ORONO – Thirty recent landscape paintings by University of Maine art professor Michael Lewis are on exhibit at the University of Maine Department of Art’s Carnegie Gallery 1 at Carnegie Hall on the Orono campus.

“Michael Lewis, Recent Paintings,” will be on display through Thursday, March 16. The public is welcome to attend the exhibit free of charge. Carnegie Hall hours are 9 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays.

Lewis is known for unusually luminous landscapes created through a technique that employs oil paints applied to a paper surface washed in turpentine. He said he continues to be drawn, after 31 years working with the turpentine wash technique, to the “distinct quality of sensuality and a subtle expressive energy” that results.

“I would like to create paintings in which the viewer recognizes the reality of a landscape, but does not get locked into the ‘present moment’ by overly detailed physical descriptions,” Lewis said. “My hope is to invite movement from the particulars of the external world to a timeless inner space that is at once more personal, emotional and spiritual.”

He said that the spontaneous and improvisational nature of the turpentine wash process fosters his excitement with on-going technical innovation and the continuing evolution of the conceptual framework that landscape provides.

“I begin the painting process with repeated visits to specific landscape sites,” he said. “Later, in the isolation of my studio, I work from memory and invention rather than from studies or photographs. There is no preplanning … the images arise unexpectedly, like dreams.”

Lewis’ work is widely respected, collected and exhibited throughout and beyond the United States, at galleries including the Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Uptown Gallery in New York City and Steven Scott Gallery in Baltimore, Md.

Twenty-seven of his paintings, drawings and prints are included in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. His work also is in the collections of the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, the Portland Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, among others. Lewis’ paintings also have been acquired for numerous corporate collections.

This year, Lewis was invited to be a part of the U.S. Department of State’s “Art in the Embassies” program. Four of his paintings were selected for exhibition at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, for four years.

Lewis also created a painting that was used by Doubleday as the cover of the book “The Mountain of Silence,” by UM sociology professor Kyriacos Markides. The book has a significant national distribution.

Lewis was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and received a master’s degree in painting from Michigan State University in 1964 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the State University College, New Paltz, N.Y., in 1975. He came to the University of Maine in 1966.

In addition to teaching painting and drawing, Lewis served as chairman of the art department 1975-1981 and 1987-1993, and as acting associate dean of the UM College of Arts and Sciences 1981-1983.

To learn more about the exhibition, call MaJo Keleshian, gallery coordinator, 581-3267 or Laurie Hicks, professor of art, 581-3247.