{"id":11270,"date":"2015-12-31T12:51:27","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T17:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=11270"},"modified":"2015-12-31T12:51:27","modified_gmt":"2015-12-31T17:51:27","slug":"urbane-rattle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/urbane-rattle\/","title":{"rendered":"Urbane Rattle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Winterguide 2016 | view this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, illustrator Charlie Hewitt dares to crash our consciousness.<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Story & Photos by Diane Hudson<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Charlie-Hewett-WG16\"When Charlie Hewitt<\/strong> rattles Manhattan\u2019s (and Portland\u2019s) cages, art lovers are riveted in the moment. But if you stalk him to his studio to see where the creator of Urban Rattle<\/em> lives, he surprises with a sense of \u2018here and now\u2019 in not one but three places:\u00a0 <\/span>Lewiston, Portland, and New York. <\/span><\/p>\n

For his deepest and darkest beginnings, it\u2019s Lewiston, where he was born in 1946. Like Marsden Hartley, he channels the river for creative energy. <\/span><\/p>\n

More recently, Hewitt\u2019s creative work gets done in Portland. The quintessential artist turbine, Hewitt sizzles in his 2,000-square-foot space studio space in the former Calderwood Bakery building on Pleasant Street.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I am starting a new body of work,\u201d as he did for the Rattle<\/em> sculpture series, two of which are in Maine\u2013one in Lewiston, the other, Portland\u2013\u201cI begin with doodles. I have hundreds of pages of doodles.\u201d He holds up a wild page of them from this month alone. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI believe in coming at ideas inadvertently, through the back door. This doodling isn\u2019t high art, but I love this low way of thinking, scratching around, allowing things to pop up from my subconscious. That\u2019s where my best ideas lie.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hewitt once told a friend he considered his work a bit silly. But it\u2019s silly like a fox, part \u201cidiot,\u201d part \u201csophisticate.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In December, Portland Rattle<\/em> rose in the middle of Portland\u2019s Arts District, at 511 \u00a0 <\/span>Congress Street. The sculptures are a cluster of hollow aluminum abstract shapes, each seven to nine feet high, set atop 20-foot aluminum light poles. The shapes, \u201cdoodle-like\u201d and painted in glorious color contrasted with black to \u201cbring it all into balance,\u201d are open to interpretation.<\/span><\/p>\n

It All Begins In Lewiston<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Another sophisticate success came for Charlie in 2015 in a collaboration with director Gary Robinov, producing the moving film about Muhammed Ali, Raising Ali: A Lewiston Story<\/em>. Neil Leifer\u2019s photo, capturing Ali urging Liston to \u201cGet up and fight<\/em>,\u201d was the inspiration for Hewitt, and the photo hangs in his studio today. Hewitt told The New York Times<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s a sentimental portrait of a struggling old factory town that was visited by greatness. And what Ali told Liston as he was standing over him resonates today. Lewiston is still trying to get up and fight.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hewitt identifies strongly with his home town of Lewiston\/Auburn, and was deeply disturbed by the string of fires that were set in Lewiston in recent years. \u201cWhat are they doing, destroying this beautiful place?\u201d he asked. He vowed to build sculptures on the burn sites. Lewiston Rattle<\/em> was completed and installed in August 2015 on lower Lisbon Street. An evolution of his previous Urban Rattle<\/em>, which stands along the High Line in Lower Manhattan, the\u00a0 <\/span>Lewiston piece is \u201csimple, clever, and successful.\u201d He\u2019d like to see all the lots the city can\u2019t sell or use transformed through public art pieces.<\/p>\n

Lewiston\u2019s Rattle<\/em> has some specific, identifiable references such as the Iron Cross, alluding to Marsden Hartley\u2019s iconography; a nod to Franco-American heritage with a fleur-de-lis; and to the Somali population, using the country\u2019s shape and colors of blue and white. <\/span><\/p>\n

Hewitt says of the Rattle<\/em> shapes, \u201cThere are nods to nature with tree allusions, the sun, or some kind of high spirited form. There are no words. These are visual movements, a narrative constantly changing. As soon as I describe them, they are no longer interesting.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Creative Collaboration<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A walk through his Portland studio shows lots of projects underway, in several media. Tables are covered with large bowls sculpted from clay. Collaborating with Sam Thomason, who molds the forms for the bowls and does the firing, Hewitt does the carving and makes engravings on the clay, cutting out inserts that will adhere to the center of the bowl. He then paints inside the lines, has them fired, paints again. \u201cThey become painting instruments\u2013I am really a painter at heart.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a demand for these\u2013my gallery in New York (Jim Kempner Fine Art in the Chelsea gallery district)<\/span> is sold out, and another gallery in Connecticut is planning a show of them. They are misunderstood and fall into the \u2018craft\u2019 field, so they don\u2019t sell for as much as prints or paintings. But that allows for more playfulness and less angst among the buyers who can just say, \u2018I love it\u2019 and buy it without considering all the aspects that go into making an art investment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there are the large, wonderfully colorful, multi-layered prints in progress. For these, he works with David Wolfe, a master printer specializing in relief and intaglio printing, whose studio and enviable collection of printing equipment is adjacent to Hewitt\u2019s at the Bakery. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCollaboration is everything to me,\u201d Hewitt says, mentioning several artists he works with (Bob Menard and his son Dan at Ball & Chain Forge for sculpture; Sam Thomason for ceramics; Gary Robinov, film; David Twiss, print and woodworking). \u201cMaine is special for me that way. It has changed my world.\u201d He likens his eight\u00a0 <\/span>years at the Bakery studios to the Brill building in New York during the musical heyday of the 1950s and early 1960s, or the old days in Soho where the artists\u2019 studios were all stacked up. \u201cIf you needed paint or a beer, there was always somebody to go see.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Marsden Hartley Spark<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This leads to talk of his next project, illustrating Androscoggin<\/em>, a book of Marsden Hartley poems, in collaboration with David Wolfe. \u201cThis would never happen if Wolfe and I were in New York. He\u2019d be somewhere in East Red Hook\u2013we might get together a time or two, then it gets to be a hassle, so why not just use Kinko\u2019s?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We walk into Wolfe\u2019s intriguing space and find the Hartley work that so excites them. Androscoggin<\/em> was published in 1940, three years prior to Hartley\u2019s death.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI discovered this book by accident when I was 22,\u201d says Hewitt. While visiting a friend on Cape Cod he spotted it on a shelf and said, \u201cHey, I grew up on that river!\u201d Opening it, he discovered the book was by Marsden Hartley and was astonished to learn that this artist, whom he greatly admired, was born in Lewiston. \u201cThey never told us that when we were kids!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He adds, \u201cThe book became something of a reference to me, like the river to Hartley, a reference to youth and the dark and oceans. It\u2019s part of my Lewiston heritage.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The three of us return to Charlie\u2019s studio, as Wolfe also wants to see Hewitt\u2019s drawings in progress for the project. Thumbing through a pad full of doodles dedicated to the book, Hewitt reads from the poem \u201cLewiston is a Pleasant Place.\u201d He begins: \u201c\u2018The harsh grinding of the mills rang in my ears for years\u2026\u2019<\/em>\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Just that \u201cis enough for me to see smoke stacks and wheel things being churned out,\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>he says, \u201cand then we come to the \u2018log drives and jams above the falls\u2026settling into jackstraw patterns\u2019<\/em>\u2026\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAha! I\u2019ve got this great image here. I like this one. Just piles of logs. A stack, a crazy stack of logs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The River of Time<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Hewitt first arrived in New York in the mid-1960s, settling in Soho to work as an artist. He studied at the New York Studio School but thinks of his education and inspiration as being a lot like his mentor, Herman Melville. Hewitt owns more than 250 copies of Moby-Dick<\/em> in many languages.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I read this book at 23, I thought it was written by an old man. Now that I\u2019m an old man, I realize it was written by a boy. That\u2019s a phenomenon I like to bridge back and forth. For Melville, the book came pouring out of his subconscious. Nobody taught this young man how to write; he learned how to live, and the writing came after. I appreciate that his education was in work, not in the university. Similarly, I\u2019ve done a lot of living and am very secure in that, so my work is secure because of that struggle.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hewitt\u2019s creations can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Fogg Art Museum, and in Maine at the Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, and the museums at Bowdoin and Colby colleges.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hewitt\u2019s next Rattle<\/em> is slated for Dallas. Beyond that, Charlie hopes for one in Eastport. \u201cWhat fun to see the sun rising over it and the Canadians looking down, saying, \u201cWhat the heck are they doing over there?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winterguide 2016
\nSculptor, painter, printmaker, illustrator Charlie Hewitt dares to crash our consciousness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[101],"class_list":["post-11270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-winterguide2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11270"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11274,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11270\/revisions\/11274"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}