Paul Lewing

First Snow, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 24 x 36 x 2 inches. Retail Value: $1900.

First Snow, is by Paul Lewing, a beloved and longtime figure in the Northwest ceramics community. Paul has been a professional clay artist in Seattle since 1972. Trained under renowned ceramic artist Rudy Autio, he is especially known for his painterly ceramic tile work, his remarkable range of imagery, and his expertise in glaze chemistry.

Interestingly, Paul approaches acrylic painting much as he approaches china paint on ceramics—building the image in layers of color, shading, texture, details, and highlights. He jokes that painting is considerably more cooperative: it doesn’t run, crawl, chip, pinhole, break, or unexpectedly change color in the kiln. First Snow is a wonderful opportunity to see the painterly sensibility behind the ceramic work for which Paul is so well known.

First Snow comes from what Paul describes as one of those “last good days” of a Northwest autumn: an October day when it is sunny, you know the rain is coming, and you simply have to go hiking. A light snow had fallen the night before his hike to Melakwa Lake near Snoqualmie Pass. By the time he arrived, most of it had melted in the sun, with snow lingering only in the shadows. Rather than the lake’s more familiar grand vista, Paul was drawn to its quieter end and captured that fleeting moment before the snow disappeared entirely.