The Sunnyvale Sun
News
New twist on painting any way you look at it
By Cody Kraatz
Sydell Lewis took a common painter's practice, turning a painting upside down on the easel to see if it's well-balanced, and turned it on its head, inventing a painting and hanging style that allows art owners to position her work in whatever direction they like best.
Her paintings are abstract, so they lend themselves to this more than portraits or landscapes. She uses a lot of wavy lines that evoke very different optical sensations depending on their orientation to the eye.
"This is very new. This is the first time I've introduced the automated part," says Lewis, stepping up to a painting in her bright and airy studio in the front of her Sunnyvale Eichler home.
She reaches up behind the painting from the bottom and presses a button, and with a whir the 3-by-3-foot canvas rotates 90 degrees so the waves are now vertical.
The automated rotating device, with can be set to rotate every one, five, 10 or 15 minutes, comes on the heels of various prototypes that Mark Galt, a kinetic artist and electronics designer, builds to her specifications.
"This is new territory. I don't know whether people are going to like it or not," Lewis says, counting on recent buyers' feedback to get a sense of how to move forward.
The cutting edge is risky ground. "I don't want people to think it's a gimmick, because it's not. If it didn't rotate, then it's still good work."
Though she might prefer a particular orientation, the paintings she's producing now can hang however the owner wants them, Lewis says. And she is finding a market for them. She sold three pieces recently through her show at Gallery House, a cooperative she belongs to in Palo Alto. Her prices range from $350 for the smaller 1-by-1-foot canvases she uses to $2,500 for larger pieces.
Her paintings themselves are inspired by optical art, or op art, a genre that includes images that create optical illusions and almost appear to move. The painters Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley pioneered the movement in the 1960s, and Lewis looks to them for inspiration. She has a few Vaserely paintings in her home.
"It's funny how things seep into your head," she says. Before an op art revival caught her eye at a Bridget Riley show in New York City, her work was very geometric and linear, evoking a fabric-like texture with all the patterns, shapes and images she packs in.
Her lines began to wave after she saw how op artists, which she is not, use shapes to energize the eyes. She wants to keep the eye moving through her painting.
She starts her paintings with a layer of paint consisting of geometric shapes, and then starts painting the wavy lines over that. Some evoke water, air or the sea for her, and she names them accordingly. They invite the viewer to participate as much as the rotate-ability of her paintings.
"Abstract art lends itself to that. I'm giving the viewer more options," she says.
Lewis, who grew up in Brooklyn, first started painting in elementary school and then attended an art-based high school in Manhattan.
Lewis, who decided to study chemistry and leaned over mass spectrometers in the biomedical industry until 1992. She took art classes in the evenings, unsure she could make a living at it, but when she married Kenneth M. Straub, his support and encouragement pushed her to take the leap.
To see more of Sydell Lewis' art, visit www.sydellart.com or contact her as sydell3@comcast.net or 408.746.2950.
