Page 6 - Art First: Simon Lewty and Will Maclean: Charting a Decade II

Simon Lewty, Maclean’s contemporary, was equally the beneficiary of an art

school education that equip ped him with skills no longer provided by our colleges.
I was privileged to be the interviewer for the Artists’ Lives recording he made

between 2006 and 2009, during which, amongst myriad topics, we documented

the exercises in calligraphy which he undertook at Mid-Warwick shire School

of Art and which perhaps taught him the control of nib and pencil that was later

to flourish in text and image pieces and purely textural works. Amongst my

favourite passages in Lewty’s recording is the long conversation we under took

about the relative qualities of graphite grading scales; how many among the rest
of us could be so eloquent about the possibil ities of an HB pencil com pared

to a soer lead? e pristine layers of snow white tissue paper which Lewty some -

times employs, and the broken sentences which he introduces, frequently act

as a break on the reader’s quest to uncover the full meaning of a line of words;

like the buried Princess, there is only a partial recovery.

Much, though not all, of the work of Lewty and Maclean implies a narrative

whilst at the same time not making full disclosure. Whilst the art is, of course,

autonomous, the Artists’ Lives inter views–life story oral history recordings
conducted for and archived in the British Library–uncover the context in which

the work was made and trace something of the thoughts and feelings that