Peter Wayne Lewis is a master of composition. With his Strings series he exhibits the ease with which he composes by dropping lines of paint, thick, thin, curvy and jagged, unto a stark white canvas. What is interesting about this series of works are the designs formed  by the spaces between the strings, the odd and interesting negative space that makes the work more about the void than the ‘carnivalesque’ strings that dangle so meaningfully on each canvas. These strings take on different characteristics but most of the time they act like lifelines, umbilical cords, ways to connect the source to the creation. Sometimes these strings flat line and offer us only the lazy unraveling of a successfully placed line. Lewis’ minimal compositions are a departure from the composition techniques of traditional Jamaican art. He offers us a new way of looking at light and space.  Lewis has exhibited extensively including many international venues. His work has been shown in Japan, Germany and Senegal as well as all over the United States and the Caribbean. His work was included in the seminal exhibition of Caribbean art, Caribbean Visions, which traveled around the United States from 1995 to 1998. He resides in both New Jersey and Massachusetts. He is a professor of painting, with his contemporary, Kofi Kayiga, at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

 “The work that I am doing now is about light… the different qualities of light. In fact, you can think about how we are formed as human beings.  We are formed in the womb. So we come out of the dark and we are born into the light.  That’s something I think about. I am always trying to think about issues of birth and death and light because these really are the key points… the key issues for all of us… and painting for me is always about being alive in the world… and it’s not a casual affair by any means.”