Michael Lewandowski

Coming into this world less than three months before JFK was killed was an unbeknownst welcome into a violent and tumultuous time in American history. Born in Western New York our family moved from Depew to Albany to Pittsburgh back to Depew all before I finished third grade. Moving so much at such a young age fueled my creative nature in many ways. Creating stories to impress new friends, imagining new homes, creating toys from moving boxes, mischievously trying to get food with four other hungry children made me inventive in satisfying my needs for art, food and attention. My first experience in creating art was with gallons of household paint and our neighbors brand newly poured concrete porch as my canvas. I had no idea who Jackson Pollock was at the impressionable age of 6 but I did my best impersonation of his work all over that porch that my mother had to scrub clean by hand as I stood motionless on newspapers on the kitchen floor with my entire body and clothing covered in paint,(because rolling in paint was so much fun) and instructed by my shocked mother not to move until she finished the clean up hell. Coloring books of native American heros was not enough to contain my instincts for a large surface that screamed, "paint me." By the summer of 1979 father instructed us to take up residents in Overland Park KS, (Hey father do they have rock and rock in Kansas?) Music by this time in my life was like oxygen whereas buying a bass guitar was my next creative adventure,(still play the bass today along with the sitar) which had me learning all about the false hopes of becoming a rock star. By 1983 I decided that doing something with my life besides wandering aimlessly might be a good idea to at occupy my immense creative urges so I decided to attend the University of Kansas and study theatre design because designing lights for the stage sounded cool and required not a single class in mathematics. As is turned out the subject matter and most instructors where much less than desirable. My love for the basic drawing classes with a host of incredible instructors in the art building was just the escape I needed from the structured, limited and wasteful nature of the theatre. By the time painting classes were able to be taken the emphasis was on abstract art, yes thank god finally my calling and reason for being alive hit me like a ton of baked bricks. Learning to build stretcher frames by hand instead of buying ready made store bought frames is a practice I still indulge in to this day. In 1987 escape from Kansas was essential so on to Boulder Colorado I went. Nature is my biggest influence and by having the mindset that naturally occurring environmental events took place over billions of years of evolution and all its glorious inspiration for creating works of art is endless and forever generously abundant. I have many pieces that have taken 10-15 years to create by searching, exploring, and honing a vision taking its time to evolve into a organic granite earth like appearance that demands extensive viewing adding long term value to peoples lives by enticing them to look at things differently with depth beyond the superficial. I was on an interview shortly after college and the hiring manager asked me what are my goals and I proudly and promptly answered, "I want to be the greatest painter in America." The look on his face was priceless and while my naivete' had me looking elsewhere for employment, I learned the valuable lesson to not give that particular answer in any forthcoming job interviews that were geared outside the art world. With well over 1,000 pieces of art in my collection, being prolific is not an obstacle. My influences range from cave painting to Renaissance art, Hindu Temples, Romantic period painting, Impressionism, Expressionism, Minimalism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, but most of all nature from our grand mother Earth. My heroes are Dekoning, Pollock, Kline, Richter, Turner, and of course Picasso, along with Rembrandt, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Ansel Adams.

Bachelor of Fine Arts: University of Kansas 1983-1987