Charlie Hewitt Sculpture

KempnerFineArt West23rdStreet NewYork,NY10011

This catalogue was published by Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York City.

www.jimkempnerfineart.com212. 206. 6872

Photography by David Wolfe.Designed by Alina Gallo.

Prints reproduced in this catalogue are held in copyright by the artist © 2010.

Essay copyright by Edgar Allen Beem © 2010.

Cover: Blue Devil, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 100” x 60” x 36”(detail)

Charlie Hewitt Sculpture

Charlie Hewitt Sculpture

Playful and Serious Edgar Allen Beem

Charlie Hewitt is both a protean and a prolific artist. He is primarily a painter, but he is a painter who manages to successfully translate the language of his paintings into prints, ceramics and sculpture, creating a large family of object that are all visually and viscerally related. The basis of all of Hewitt’s art is drawing. Indeed, walking into his studio in a former industrial bakery building in Portland, Maine, as he prepared for his sculpture exhibition at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York was like stepping into a three dimensional drawing. Colorful cubes, cones, chains, commas and curls of steel connected by black line-like rods filled two white rooms, some standing big and bold floor to ceiling, many more resting small and as-sertive on wooden shelves. If you weren’t familiar with Charlie Hewitt’s visual vocabulary, you might think he had just been doodling in steel. But Hewitt’s symbolic images are loaded and in-tentional, physical embodiments of his working-class Franco-American heritage. Charlie Hewitt grew up in the Maine mill towns of Auburn and Brunswick. On his mother’s side he comes from a family of steeplejacks. The bent nails, screws, hammers, saw blades, jagged metal rebar and braided rope that recur throughout his work in every medium speak to lives of manual labor. Hewitt is a very physical artist. He is a very spiritual one as well, though not in a conventionally religious way. The iconography of his Roman Catholic upbringing finds its way into his art as a kind of secu-larize Stations of the Cross. The cubes conjure the tumbling dice of Roman soldiers casting lots for the crucified Christ’s garments, yet they can also be read as symbols of chance or just abstract cubes. Then there is a serrated form that might be a rooster’s comb, an allusion to the rooster who cried three times after Peter denied Jesus, the rooster being an age old symbol of Christ’s pas-sion. Though Hewitt’s sculptures are informed by drawings, he actually draws directly on steel with soapstone. The lines are then cut with a blowtorch and the artist uses both the positive and nega-tive elements in his work, the excised image and the hollow ground from which it came.

The cutting based on Hewitt’s lines and the welding based on his maquettes was executed by the Ball & Chain Forge in Portland. “Because of the quality of craftsman-ship in Maine I am able to work with something that is rigid and make it seem fluid,” says Hewitt. Early on, Hewitt left his metal sculpture raw and un-painted, polishing and oxidation determining the finish. Two years ago, he rendered them bright and shiny with auto body paint. More recently, he has been hand-painting them with some transitional pieces combining the high gloss of automotive paint with the more painterly touch of copper-based paints. “I think like a painter, but then I use the space,” says Hewitt. “The smaller ones are interesting to me because I can get my hands on them.” The results of all this drawing, cutting, welding, han-dling, and painting are abstract sculptures that are like 3-D characters that have stepped out of Hewitt’s paint-ings and prints. Antic and animated, they also possess a certain anxiousness. As curator Pat Nick observed in an interview she did with Hewitt on the occasion of his 2006 retrospective at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, “Much of your imagery at first appears whimsi-cal, but on second look there’s always a dark side.” One hundred years ago, in his 1910 book How We Think, the philosopher John Dewey wrote, “To be play-ful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition.” All of Charlie Hewitt’s art is at once playful and serious, a rare quality it shares with only a handful of other artists. Alexander Calder, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Hewitt’s mentor Philip Guston come first to mind. On the playful side, Charlie Hewitt’s sculpture is end-lessly entertaining with its lively colors and surprising combinations of forms. On the serious side, these curi-ous objects aspire to that ideal mental state in which the personal takes on universal meaning, the aesthetic ah-ha that occurs when an artist makes sense of the phenomenal world by adding something new and unexpected to it.

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French Beauty, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 46” x 15” x 6”

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Eden, 2010 Steel, copper patina and pigment 41” x 28” x 10”

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Blue Rooster, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 25” x 13” x 7”

Highland Gypsy 1, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 46” x 39” x 8”

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Blue Rooster, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 25” x 13” x 7”

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Maritime Flags, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 33” x 23” x 5”(top)

Old Town 4, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 15” x 8” x 4”(right)

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Aztec, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 103” x 58” x 18”

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Rooster, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 21” x 12” x 5”(top)

Ragman 2, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 19” x 14” x 6”(right)

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Blue Devil, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 100” x 60” x 36”

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Station 5, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 16” x 13” x 5”

Meridian, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 26” x 16” x 4”

Prince Steve, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 25” x 22” x 5”

Phonecian, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 20” x 14” x 6”

Highland, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 15” x 12” x 5”

Little Adam, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 15” x 13” x 7”

Highland Dancer, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 31” x 17” x 5”

Old Town 1, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 19” x 14” x 5”

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Yankee Max, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 60” x 50” x 11”

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Ragman, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 30” x 20” x 11”

Lefty, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 21” x 15” x 8”

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Aristocrat, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 33” x 24” x 5”

Old Town 2, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 23” x 9” x 4”

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Ragman (study), 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 20” x 13” x 7”

Small Rascal, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 20” x 19” x 6”

Ragman (study), 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 20” x 13” x 7”

Small Rascal, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 20” x 19” x 6”

True Cross, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 16” x 11” x 5”

Station 6, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 18” x 14” x 4”

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Red Rooster, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 62” x 12” x 8” (left)

Urban Rattle, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 74” x 24” x 7” (right)

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Rascal, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 92” x 74” x 31”

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Red Rooster, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 62” x 12” x 8” (left)

Urban Rattle, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 74” x 24” x 7” (right)

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Rascal, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 92” x 74” x 31”

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Scribe, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 32” x 16” x 5”

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Hitch, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 24” x 20” x 7”

Aztec (study), 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 27” x 16” x 9”

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Beckett, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 32” x 8” x 4” (left)

Old Town 3, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 17” x 14” x 4” (right)

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Highland Gypsy, 2010Steel, copper patina and pigment 48” x 38” x 14”

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Photo by Sean Sullivan.

Ball and Chain Forge. Bob Menard and Dan Memory.

Biography

Selected Solo Exhibitions2010 Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York City2010 Icon Gallery, Bruswick, Maine2008 Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York City2007 Whitney Art Works, Portland Maine2006 Farnsworth Museum, Rockland Maine Olin Arts Center, Bates College, Lewiston Maine2004 Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York City2001 Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York City1998 Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York City Arden Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts1997 June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, Maine Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York City1996 Ralph Greene Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico1995 Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York City Arden Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts1994 Kouros Gallery, New York City Paula Paulette Fine Arts, Portland, Maine1993 Ralph Greene Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico1992 Olin Arts Center, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine Dranoff Fine Arts, New York City Dean Valentgas Gallery, Portland, Maine

CollectionsThe Whitney Museum of Art, New York CityMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York City The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, Relief PortfolioMIT, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MassachusettsThe Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca, New York. Elindean PortfolioThe New York Public Library, New York CityThe Portland Museum of Art, Portland, MaineThe Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South CarolinaBates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, MaineColby College Museum of Art, Waterville, MaineBowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, MaineThe Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MassachusettsPhillips Academy, Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts, Eldindean PortfolioThe Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, MaineHood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New HampshireChase Manhattan Bank, New York CityChemical Bank, New York CityMaryland Bank and Trust, Lexington Park, MarylandPrudential Insurance, New York CityState University of New York, Binghamton, New YorkDillard Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina

Grants and Awards1998 New York State Foundation for the Arts, Painting1997 New York Foundation for the Arts, Drawings, Prints1974 New York State Council on the Arts, CAPS Grant

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