Kris Lewis

Kris Lewis is an American contemporary realist painter born in 1978 in Ocean County, New Jersey, and based in Los Angeles. He studied illustration at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His work focuses almost exclusively on large-format female portraits, painted in oil with a technique that draws from the classical masters he admires — Hans Holbein, Albrecht Dürer, Andrew Wyeth, Hieronymus Bosch and Gustav Klimt — to construct figures of extraordinary physical and emotional presence. His characters are amalgams of multiple sources, fictional figures that embody a specific emotion or narrative: strong and fragile, seductive and isolated, carriers of stories only the painter knows but the viewer intuits. His mother's Latvian heritage — she fled communist forces — deeply permeates his artistic sensibility. His work has appeared in Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, Modern Painters and American Art Collector.