“When I was little, my mum used to tell me and my two brothers not to compare
ourselves to other families, because we weren’t like other families,” says
the painter Whyn Lewis.
“It’s true to say that when we were growing up, we didn’t have a ‘normal’
life,” she adds. “I was the original hippie child. My parents were living in
a wagon in Peeblesshire with my older brother when I was born and we were
constantly on the move. I was named after the gorse bushes which were in
full bloom at the time. It wasn’t like the cliché everyone expects, but it
was definitely alternative.”
Lewis, who is about to have her fourth solo show at London’s Portal Gallery,
is fast becoming one of Scotland’s most collectable figurative artists. She
paints delicately rendered animals such as whippets, hares, deer and birds,
their antennae twitching in the wind as they register the presence of other
creatures.
The paintings range in price from £1,000 to £10,000. Each one takes more than
a month to complete and glows with the same quiet energy that Lewis displays
in the flesh. She is 36, but looks much younger. Tall and slim, with long
dark hair and wide eyes, she could be a fawn suddenly disturbed in a forest
clearing.
If Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous was a cardboard cut-out child of a hippie,
Lewis, the daughter of the cult singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan, is the real
deal.
Bunyan’s album Lookaftering, released in 2005, features sleeve artwork by her
daughter. The cover image of a startled hare perfectly suits the quietly
lyrical mood of the music.
“My animals are not perfect copies,” says Lewis. “I don’t paint from life, but
that painting was inspired by an encounter with a hare when I was living in
the Borders before moving to Edinburgh. I was driving up my track and the
hare ran out in front of me and just sat there eyeballing me. It was quite
magical.”
In many ways, Bunyan’s story has shaped her daughter’s life and art, although
Lewis says her mother didn’t talk much about her musical past. “I vaguely
knew about her knowing the Rolling Stones, but I didn’t know the details.”
Bunyan was discovered playing guitar and singing in a Soho club by Andrew Loog
Oldham, then the manager of the Stones, in the mid-1960s. Her first album,
Just Another Diamond Day, was released to critical acclaim in 1970.
But, disillusioned with the music industry and pregnant with Lewis’s older
brother, Leif, Bunyan decided to head with boyfriend Robert Lewis to the
Scottish Borders.
When Lewis was nine, the family put down roots for the first time, moving to a
ramshackle farmhouse near Gartmore, Stirlingshire.
“They didn’t live in all these different places because they particularly
wanted to,” she says. “They didn’t have any money. They wanted to own their
own home and they eventually achieved this through buying and selling goods
in the way they’d been taught to by travelling people when we were on the
road.”
It was in this first real home — “which I still dream about” — that Lewis
started to gain a sense of rootedness to the land and the animals that
inhabit it. “I feel strongly that as a society, we have lost our connection
to animals,” she says.
“Early man had to understand animals and they way they worked, but there is
less need now, even though we share the same environment.” It is this
aesthetic that dominates Lewis’s work today.
She never wanted to be anything other than a painter, she says. “My parents
encouraged all of us in our ambitions. They both said that we could do
anything we wanted.”
When Lewis arrived at Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s, she again
found herself swimming against the tide of convention.
“Before I got there, Glasgow was a breeding ground for figurative art, but by
the time I arrived it was all very conceptual. Nobody was painting. It was
all 10ft canvases with nothing in it and I quickly realised I could only be
myself.”
Lewis’s muse during this period was her pet whippet, Indie. “I was given him
by my parents for my 16th birthday and he suffered from terrible separation
anxiety, so I ended up using him as my model because that way he could be
with me at art school every day. They bent the rules for me because I was
painting him all the time.”
This determination to plough her own furrow has served Lewis well in her 14
years as a full-time artist.
Jess Wilder, the director of the Portal Gallery, was introduced to Lewis’s
work by Sheilagh Tennant, a curator who had seen her paintings nine years
before and instantly recognised her as a “Portal artist”.
“She has that real attention to detail which is a hallmark of a Portal
artist,” says Wilder. The gallery, which has just celebrated its 50th
anniversary, launched the careers of celebrated figurative artists including
John Byrne and Beryl Cook.
“First off you think Whyn’s paintings are just nice pictures of animals but,
when you dig deeper, they are so much more. They are extremely complex
metaphors for life and how we live it, with a mix of fantastic detail and
haunting beauty.
“Whyn is an extraordinarily focused person who has a real following among our
clients, particularly in the US. We usually sell every single painting in
her solo exhibitions and I don’t see that this exhibition will be any
different.”
For this latest batch of paintings, Lewis has returned to familiar ground,
with subject matter such as the hunter and the hunted (deer and deerhound)
and a pair of hovering starlings caught mid-flutter.
The backgrounds, as always, are heavily layered. In one painting, Enchanted,
the dense black background — made up of about a dozen layers of dark blue
oil-paint — creates an almost tangible sense of foreboding, throwing into
relief the beautifully detailed, almost louche portrayal of a deerhound
wearing a jewelled collar with the motif of a leaping white deer.
Although she usually works with plain backgrounds that accentuate her figures,
she has been experimenting with tiny patterns in the background, which add
yet another dimension to the work.
Lewis admits that, like her mother, she suffers from crippling bouts of
self-doubt. “Mum gets so nervous before she goes on stage, she‘s almost
ill,” she says. “It never gets any easier,” she admits.
“Earlier this year, I had a real crisis of confidence and started questioning
why I wasn’t producing anything new and groundbreaking.
“Then, in the midst of it, I went to see the Raphael to Renoir exhibition at
the National Galleries of Scotland, which had drawings from the collection
of the Swiss banker, Jean Bonna, and was stopped in my tracks.
“The drawing which caught me was Hans Hoffmann’s study of a wild boar piglet
from the 16th century. It reminded me of what I was doing and why; that it
doesn’t matter if it’s not groundbreaking, as long as you put your heart and
soul into it, which is what these artists did.
“I ended up going back to see the exhibition six times and, every time, I was
drawn back to that piglet. It was so delicate, it was actually
heartbreaking.
“These drawings were made with such patience and love. It’s incredible to
think that 500 years on, these little scraps of paper still hold such magic.”
New Paintings by Whyn Lewis, Portal Gallery, 15 New Cavendish Street,
London, November 9-28, www.portalgallery.com
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