WILLIAM D. LEWIS
William D. Lewis is a painter based in Boise, Idaho, whose work explores the tension between the external world and the interior life of the studio. Rooted in a deep commitment to the painted image, his practice considers painting not simply as a creative discipline, but as a vital way of understanding and navigating the world. Through carefully observed objects, psychological portraiture, and self-reflexive investigations of the medium itself, Lewis examines how images originate, resonate, and endure.
Lewis studied at Parsons School of Design (in both New York City and Paris), earned his BFA from Hunter College, and completed his MA at New York University in 1992. After several years of working and exhibiting in New York, he relocated to Boise in 1997. He has taught at Boise State University and continues to shape the region’s arts community through his work in education and the public school system.
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Over the past decade, Lewis’ paintings have unfolded as a series of inquiries into materiality, perception, and meaning. From the domestic inventories of House Contents Grounds to the self-aware explorations of Acts of Painting, he investigates the broad range of the medium, which is at once stubbornly physical and conceptually expansive. More recent bodies of work, including Heads and Tell It Slant, turn inward, probing the mysterious origins of imagery and the symbolic weight carried by even the most ordinary objects.
His work has been exhibited in New York and throughout the Northwest, with reviews appearing in publications such as The Boise Weekly, Idaho Arts Quarterly, and Art in America. In 2011, he received a Fellowship Award from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. Lewis’ paintings are included in the collections of the Boise Art Museum, the City of Boise, the Boise Public Library, and other public and private collections.
