Scottish-born; Lewis grew up in Dumbarton before moving to Dundee to pursue a contemporary art degree in which he graduated with a first-class honours in 2020. Lewis won both the James Guthrie Orchar Memorial Prize and the Farquhar Reid Trust Prize during the degree show, as well as being selected for the Freeland’s Painting Prize. After being awarded the William S Phillips award, a bursary for his tuition fees, Lewis continued his studies at DJCAD graduating with merit in MFA Art & Humanities in 2021. Now living in Northern Ireland, Lewis has a studio in Platform, Belfast, however often explores ideas in nature, while travelling in his van. 

Drawing from ancient ancestral wisdom and contemporary innovations & insights, Deeney’s work seeks to understand our human experience in relation to our ever-changing technological world. Simultaneously looking inwards towards his own conscious experience and out towards our humanity as a whole, his work questions our collective ontology in the modern world.  

A student of yoga and meditation these greatly inform Deeney’s creative practice, and his paintings are an extension of them. The awareness and connection to self cultivated by these ancient practices is something he also achieves in his painting practice, which is a from of visual meditation. In creation but more importantly observation, the core of his creative practice is to cultivate mindfulness and inspire hope of a more beautiful world.

Composed of, and often laser cut into, interlocking geometric forms, Deeney’s process lead approach to painting combines expressive abstract painting with digitally created, geometric compositions. Evolving ancient wisdom into a modern context, Deeney’s work emphasises the necessity for mindfulness awareness and an understanding of self in relation to our technological world.

Artist Bio