Lewis Robertson

Lewis Robertson (b. 2001) is a painter from Ōtautahi Christchurch. He recently completed his art school studies at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours in 2022 and a Master of Fine Arts with Distinction in 2024.

Lewis’ paintings are figurative, bear similarities to the still life genre, and are heavily stylised, opting to capture subjects not in accurate reproductions but rather in crude approximations or depictions that are closer to how an object may appear in a cartoon than how it may appear in real life. In Lewis’ paintings, the main purposes of choosing to work with paint over other means of image-making are its proclivities to being stylised and representing imagined subjects, having no obligatory commitment to real, observable things. The selection of subject matter is also erratic and non-committal, and objects are chosen to be depicted not for any major allegorical meaning or personal significance, but pure aesthetic appreciation like a collection of shiny things. These subjects are collected in generative drawing sessions where every object that comes to mind on a chain of thought is recorded, then subjects are made into usually-random pairs and superimposed, one rendered in paint and the other in pencil, to make a multifocal image where the individual objects depicted can be read either on their own or together, with a potential conjoint meaning open to the viewer’s interpretation.