L. Gordon

''My art career started in the sixth grade when I drew a picture on the cover of a geography report and got a better grade. Since then it's never occurred to me to do anything else.'' Thus began a lifetime of doing exactly what Lewis Gordon always wanted to do - paint. Now one of America's foremost impressionists, Mr. Gordon devotes the majority of his time to his artistic endeavors. He has disciplined himself to choose a thought in the form of a single image, then build an environment around it. What derives from this process is a unique vision of reality, or the world according to L. Gordon. Over the course of his career, Gordon refined the style he calls Romantic Realism. “First I choose a focal point. It might be a park bench or a woman with a red watering can. Then I give that focal point an imaginary, romantic setting,” he explains. “My paintings are my feelings about a place as much as they are about what the place actually looks like,” says Gordon. “If I find a subject I like, I’m not restricted by what I see. If the trees are small, and I imagine them more lush and tall, then I paint them that way. There is real joy in recreating the feelings I experienced by painting the scene as it looked to my soul.” Like many artists who must work to support the development of their art, Mr. Gordon spent many years as an illustrator, having honed skills at the Munich Academy while stationed at the U.S. Air Force base in Munich, Germany, and under the tutelage of Violet Moulin, a New Orleans portrait artist. He eventually opened a studio where he illustrated books for children and teenagers, as well as specialized in travel illustrations for advertising. In his paintings, he uses acrylics on canvas after first working out his idea in small pencil sketches. He uses a great deal of bright colors, sometimes adding flowers so that he may use even more color. L. Gordon has won numerous awards for both his commercial and fine artworks, including the William Stein Award for Portraiture. His paintings are found in the corporate collections of AT&T, Holiday Inn, and Texas Instruments, as well as many private and museum collections.