Melancholy Sky Oil on canvas • 40" x 60"

Jessamine Valley Panaroma II Oil on panel • 18" x 72"

Jessamine Valley Panaroma III Oil on canvas • 18" x 72"

Evening Walk Oil on panel • 24" x 48"

Blue Haze Oil on panel • 24" x 48"

WORKS SOLD

About the Artist

Christopher Segre-Lewis earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Kentucky in 2005. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1976. After immigrating to the United States, he lived for many years on the east coast of Florida and now resides in central Kentucky. He is a Professor of Art at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. His paintings explore the subject of landscape, realism, and abstraction as a vehicle for expressing the divine, immortal, and sublime inherent within the context of creation. Chris, as well, explores the role in which humans exert themselves on the appearance of the landscape.

His work has been shown regionally in solo and group exhibitions, and is included in private, corporate, and national and international collections. In 2008 he received a programmatic grant to travel to Indonesia and work with various artists from both America and Asia. The work from that trip has traveled internationally as a group exhibition entitled Charis: Boundary Crossing. Chris has also derived work from his ventures to Ireland, Israel, Africa, Jamaica, and most recently, the American West.

Artist's Statement

Western Vistas

Painting and the landscape of the American west have partnered congenially for over two hundred years. Keeping in mind that Kentucky was once the new frontier west of the Allegheny Mountains, the concept of the American West has included a majority of our national landmass. Artists from Thomas Moran to Georgia O'Keefe have enjoyed the vast moonlike spaces that seem to act as a metaphorical canvas for the divine painter. Rivers become lines, fields become geometric shapes, and textures translate in effortless reverie.

These new paintings track my personal fascination with the American West. My interests are focused on the geographical interactions between humans and the land rather than mere romantic allusions. In these paintings I am suggesting the evidence of human movements guided by the sublime, yet Spartan allure of the expansive western landscape. I also hope to express the spiritual appeal of the west, with its grand, perceptually overwhelming vistas that tend to read as God- sized marks built upon celestial compositions.

Chris Segre-Lewis, 2011