Silk Roads

BY: Ramona Duoba

Artist Charlie Hewitt was just 21 years old when he came to New York City in 1968. With eleven dollars in his pocket, he didn’t think about failure. Like many artists, he came to the city looking for inspiration and creative cohorts. “I wanted to be a working artist in New York,” he said. “I didn’t even care if I was famous…I looked forward to that kind of life and it was a great life and community of artists. We all lived downtown, so it was pretty much a regional ghetto kind of experience down on the Lower East Side.”

The narrative of an artist barely getting by is now just a story to share. Today, Hewitt is an influential artist and a master printmaker, sculptor and painter. His Urban Rattle sculpture is the only permanent artwork installed along the High Line Park in Manhattan. His work is playful, serious and bold. It’s a style rooted in expressionism and surrealism that he shares with Alexander Calder, Joan Miro, Paul Klee and his mentor, Philip Guston. Hewitt’s current exhibition of paintings, Silk Roads, is at Jim Kempner Fine Art and features his largest paintings to date. Gallery owner Jim Kempner met the artist 30 years ago, at a poker game, in SOHO. He says Hewitt’s printmaking skills are not lost on his paintings, “Leo Castelli once told me that Jasper Johns considers his printmaking to be as important, if not more so, than his paintings. Charlie is the same way. He thinks as a printmaker in the way one has to plan which plates or stones will be layered upon each other to get the desired effect. This way of thinking has a huge impact on these paintings. Also, the paintings are rich with paper collage often taken directly from sections of old prints.”

The size of his paintings (84×60” and 60×108”) gave Hewitt freedom and mobility. “They need big gestural moves,” he said. “They are also multi-layered and complex like a weaving and a tapestry and that’s where the title Silk Roads came from.”

Hewitt was born in Maine and about 10-years-ago returned there to raise his family. “I’m really affected by the nature I live in,” he said and “I feel more invested in the landscape and these pieces have landscape references.” The 73 year old artist spent his career criss-crossing mediums and believes he has finally become a good painter, “I’m really satisfied with what I do, it feels like mine and nobody else’s.”

For now, painting will have to wait. The studio has been cleaned out and Hewitt plans to spend the next year working, full-time, on making prints.

Silk Roads at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York City runs through December 22nd.