Lewis Bryden

ROSTROS DE MEXICO (Faces of Mexico)
Permanent exhibition of informal Mexican portraits

Artist Bio/ Lewis Bryden
When I was a child I loved to draw and paint. These activities form some of my earliest and happiest memories. I never had any formal training, but I spent a lot of time looking at art reproductions and visiting art museums with my family. This is not unlike a lot of other artists. I even had some successes as a child artist. I sold paintings, won awards, and even got commissions. By the time I was a teenager, however, my focus had turned to architecture. In school I began to take architecture courses, and during vacations I worked for an architectural firm.

After finishing my proverbial “twenty years of schooling” I ended up with a master’s degree in architecture, and a renewed interest in painting. I had to support myself for years as a free-lance designer and architectural renderer. However, my painting became my passion. I used every opportunity to learn a mastery of oil painting. This included reading about old masters techniques, and making copies in the museum. Eventually I reached a point where I could leave architecture altogether and paint full time. To give some idea of my interests, there was a reverence for European master painting and architectural design, but I also had a familiarity with plein air painting and Russian impressionist painting, both of which actually predated architecture school.

I think that innovation and originality are great, but I keep coming back to the issue of mastery. It’s ultimately more valid, I think to seek to make the best picture possible. How can one resist the urge to make each painting better than the last and to do that by getting more and more control of the paint? Ultimately I take comfort in the thought that true originality is the by-product of being true to one’s most cherished principles. If you do what you love, the reasoning goes, how can you help but be an original?

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