Hilary Irons, gallery and exhibitions director, stands in front of “Omen” by Elizabeth Awalt, right, and “Makoko/Okobaba,” by C. Michael Lewis. Irons curated the joint exhibition, titled “As Above, So Below,” at the University of New England’s art gallery on the Biddeford campus. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
At first glance, Elizabeth Awalt and C. Michael Lewis seem like completely different painters.
Her scenes are underwater. His are from a bird’s-eye view. Her lines are raw. His are photorealistic. She is interested in the natural environment. He was fascinated by the built one.
But their work currently lives side by side at the art gallery at the University of New England in Biddeford because gallery and exhibitions director Hilary Irons saw clear parallels between them. The title of the show, “As Above, So Below,” comes from an 8th-century Hermetic text describing a relationship between the macro and the micro in the universe.
“She’s making these paintings based on drawings that she makes scuba diving, and Michael’s paintings are based on images he sees on Google Earth,” Irons said. “So his practice is focused on a very specific viewpoint of the planet, and her practice is also oriented like that.”
Awalt lives in Massachusetts and has spent summers on Swan’s Island in Maine for more than 30 years. Lewis, a Portland native who was beloved in his community, passed away at age 74 in November after a long struggle with cancer. He helped plan the UNE exhibition before his death.
Together and individually, the artists offer a new vantage point to view the world around us.
“Not everybody speaks science,” Charles Tilburg, director of the School of Marine and Environmental Programs at UNE, said. “Not everybody thinks in that way. I’m hoping we can get the students thinking in a different way so they can communicate their fondness and their sense of awe to a new community and a new audience, and one of the ways to do that is through art.”
“As Above, So Below” pairs the work of Elizabeth Awalt and C. Michael Lewis at UNE in Biddeford. The joint exhibition will be on view through May 4. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
TRAVELING THROUGH ART
Awalt, 69, started scuba diving for the first time on a family trip to Belize nine years ago. An instructor took her group below the surface of the water, and she was amazed by the wild garden she discovered there.
“I really want to paint this,” she thought.
Awalt, who taught painting at Boston College, learned how to use an underwater camera to document what she saw on her dives but wasn’t satisfied with the images. So she found a waterproof notebook to draw the coral reefs and the underwater plants. Out of the water, she sometimes makes quick watercolor paintings, still in her wetsuit. Back in the studio, she uses these sketches to create large paintings. Her sketches and watercolors are also on view with the exhibition, as is a short film about her process.
“I have to draw really, really quickly,” Awalt said. “Sometimes I’m drawing as I’m moving. It’s really fun, and it’s nuts and crazy as well. But it gives me a lot of information. Drawing slows you down. Your brain is responding to what you see in real time, and I think that brings a lot of the information back into your memory is a stronger way. I feel like it’s a really important thing for me to do as an artist. When I start looking back at the drawings, I feel like I’m really there.”
Awalt dives primarily in the Caribbean (the New England ocean is too dark and cold for her). In a way, Lewis also traveled for his work, although he didn’t have to leave the studio.
Lewis first learned architectural drafting in vocational school as a teenager, and later built a career developing architectural renderings for important projects, such as the renovation of Merrill Auditorium. His painting was similarly photorealistic, and he wrote in his artist statement for this exhibition that he had always been fascinated by site plans.
“In my line of work, we would buy or commission aerial photography to establish our plans, or better yet, rent an airplane to take our own shots,” Lewis wrote. “Access to satellite imagery was limited to expensive coffee-table books we could only drool over. When Google Earth appeared, it made the process infinitely more accessible. It went from an essential part of my work to something like recreation… almost therapeutic. Now I could travel, on a whim, anywhere in the world.”
C. Michael Lewis is pictured here while painting “Grand Palais,” one of his photorealistic pieces inspired by Google Earth views. Photo by Mary Hart
Irons saw that both artists shared a desire to explore.
“He was interested in the way that his mind could travel within the confines of the studio, which I have so much respect for,” Irons said. “And then Liz is very dedicated to travel. Her practice is predicated on the ability to travel and to really see things in person, up close, over time. It’s so fascinating to me how they’re both so dedicated to exploring their particular viewpoint, and that’s the limitation in their practice. Every artist has to impose a limitation on their practice so that they have a constraint that gives the work tension and dynamic property. and I love how differently they’re both conceptualizing that.”
A SENSE OF CURIOSITY
The gallery at the Biddeford campus is in a library, where students constantly pass through the doors looking for information.
Lewis grew up in Portland and always had a deep interest in the surrounding architecture. His early paintings — the ones that were on view when he met his future wife at a gallery show in Portland — were of city buildings. He was good at math and logic. He was fascinated by machines and toolmaking. He constructed his own frames out of wood and metal for the show, choosing the materials deliberately based on the subject.
“He just got interested in the built environment, what man does to the earth and what we make,” said Mary Hart, an artist and Lewis’ wife for 30 years.
C. Michael Lewis, “Crop Circle,” 2022, acrylic on board. Image courtesy of the artist
Awalt, for her part, has always been interested in the natural world. For many years, she made much of her work outside. She still spends time observing, sketching and documenting the places she wants to paint.
“I really get to know it,” she said. “I become immersed in it, and I really get to know it and all its different qualities, time of day, time of year and so forth.”
Tilburg said this exhibition offered a natural opportunity for partnership, and Awalt will teach a workshop for students during the course of the exhibition. Like the artists, they are curious about the world around them. He sees the gallery as a place where they can think about science’s bigger picture, literally and figuratively.
“They’re looking at it as a profession,” he said. “They’re looking it as, ‘How can I understand more about the individual details of the environment?’ and I’m hoping they also are going to see an appreciation for the total environment.”
Irons said these artists can offer the students — and anyone — a more expansive point of view.
“What I want to impart to the students is the sense that visual thinking skills are a strategy that can be learned,” she said. “Having a sense of intellectual curiosity can expand across all kinds of disciplines, and you don’t have to be anchored in any one particular discipline to make use of these skills.”
Elizabeth Awalt sketches while scuba diving as part of her process. “As Above, So Below” includes scans of those underwater drawings. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
DOCUMENTING CHANGE
In the center of the gallery, Irons hung two paintings: “Omen” by Awalt, showing a wild mashup of coral in vibrant pink and purple and blue, and “Makoko/Okobaba” by Lewis, which shows aerial views of a dense settlement on stilts and a sawmill near Lagos, Nigeria.
Awalt has often returned to the same sites on land and underwater over years. As a result, she has seen mussels vanish from the tide pools outside her island house and the reefs turn from pink to brown. The tubular coral in “Omen” always remind her of mouths, and she imagined them crying out for help as she made the painting.
“It wasn’t my intent when I started out to make paintings that were related to environmental change, but over years and years, that now becomes an important element in my work from experience,” she said.
Liz Awalt, “Feeding Station,” 2024, oil on linen. Image courtesy of the artist
Lewis wrote about the changes he has seen from above.
“I knew that Google was constantly updating their content, so went back to see if there was better image of the casting plant I’d wanted to paint,” he wrote. “It was gone — nothing but a sea of asphalt. And the Moscow factory, painted a couple years earlier, was now a field of fresh dirt. The virtual earth, I realized, was constantly turning.”
He chose paintings for the show that all have two panels, one on top of the other in a nod to the theme of the show. Hart said her husband continued his practice until the day he went into hospice care, and she hopes to continue to show his body of work. He was entirely self-taught, she said, and the show reflects the way his work developed over the years to reach this particular style and concept.
“It made him feel alive,” Hart said. “It made him feel a sense of significance.”
Hilary Irons points out details in C. Michael Lewis’ painting “Ford Windsor,” part of the “As Above, So Below” exhibit on view at the Biddeford art gallery at UNE through May 4. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “As Above, So Below” with Elizabeth Awalt and C. Michael Lewis
WHERE: UNE Art Gallery Biddeford, Jack S. Ketchum Library, 11 Hills Beach Road, Biddeford
WHEN: Through May 4
HOURS: 8 a.m.-6 p.m. daily
HOW MUCH: Free
INFO: For more information, visit library.une.edu/art-galleries
