STEPHANIE M. LEWIS received her MFA in painting at the University of Arkansas in 1998. She is currently Chair of Visual Arts and Media at Northwest Arkansas Community College where she has taught since 1999. Her work has been shown regionally (multiple venues in Northwest Arkansas, Little Rock, and Tulsa) and nationally, notably, in Chicago. She has received awards for Drawing (Virginia Cammack Award for Best in Drawing/Pastel in the 20th Annual Artists of Northwest Arkansas Regional Exhibition), for Painting (Purchase Award in the 19th Annual Small Works on Paper Exhibition), and one of her linocuts was published in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion 2009 Engagement Calendar. The work presented in this exhibition are part of a larger series called “Unsung Heroes” partially supported by a professional development grant by NWACC.

Portraiture and figurative work have long been the focus of my professional creative work. My current series in the medium of charcoal drawing is called “Unsung Heroes.” Today, there are forces at work to focus us outward and have our needs met in one way or another by someone else, or that we need heroes to swoop in and show us the way and/or rescue us. Advertising promises us the products that will make us our best selves. Entertainers and athletes set the supposed bar for our own achievement or sense of it. We live vicarious lives of people we will never meet or know. Politicians promise to protect or save us from imagined enemies and even ourselves. The fictional, extremely action-packed CGI extravaganzas that we all have come to enjoy in the theaters, present us with a portrayal of heroes with highly stylized physiques and romanticized traits at an almost absurd level.

The drawings in “Unsung Heroes” exhibit delicately arranged patterning in every square inch. These captivating patterns are what pull the viewer in after the face has caught their attention. The mosaic of patterning that construct the subjects’ faces reveals their characters. The heroes are drawn larger-than-life to both elevate their humanity and feature their heroism. The medium is fugitive, and the substrate, fragile. The subjects, therefore, are then viewed as heroic AND vulnerable. Artifice is stripped away, and as a result, the viewer realizes that they can be the hero of their own life.