Chuck Lewis
Written by Cynthia Ferrell
Doesn't matter where Chuck Lewis’s eye landed, he always saw a story to tell - and found a way to tell it. In his 90’s, he was fascinated with his iPad, working brilliant colors into joyful shapes, creating digital compositions that glow on paper as if still backlit on screen. Prior his tool was a paintbrush, most often capturing simple subjects: a beach towel viewed from straight down; red cherries flung across a cobalt background. He painted an entire exhibit of simple portraits of the unhoused - simple until you look into their eyes.
And then there was his darkroom, where award-winning images from his cameras came to silvery life: tumbledown hutongs of Beijing, Fresno cattle on a tule-fogged morning, fresh-from-the-factory wind turbines in stark relief.
Chuck was born in California’s agricultural Central Valley in 1928. His father, artist and musician George Wright, died of pneumonia when Chuck was 3. His mother Carrie Pace sold the couple’s Healdsburg-based art store and bakery, the “Women’s Exchange and Tea Room”, piled Chuck and his big brother Jim into an open touring car and drove south to an uncle’s Mexican ranchero, carrying a stash of shotgun shells inside a spare tire.
On their return north a year later, Carrie tried smuggling a pair of parrots across the border, with less success. She settled her sons in the agricultural town of Fresno and married a railroad switch man, Homer Lewis.
Chuck and his brother both, though, had inherited the artist’s genes. Jim went on to form Sacramento’s architectural team Lewis and Bristow. And Chuck forged a long career in advertising at Reeds, Farris and Lewis in Los Angeles, crafting stylized campaigns for space shuttle components and the Port of L.A., turning iconic funny pages into a security company’s calling card and using scoops of ice cream to launch a nationwide craving for colored grout.
Ask, and he’ll say it was the storytelling he loved about the ad game - how to get the message across with punchy words and just the right graphics.
It was when he retired that he turned to fine art full time.
His wife, high school sweetheart Myralee Hanner, adjusted her decor to accommodate it all until her death in 2006.
Now it’s sometimes hard to get into Chuck’s art room sideways, for all the stacks of half-done projects, test prints, wall art requests from his four kids, and pictures waiting to be framed. The impression isn’t mess, but color, color, color that fills the space stem to stern and a joy that overflows.