biography

Based in Rochester Minnesota, Lew Woolner is a national award-winning signature member of the Pastel Society of America. He is attracted to the wonderfully haphazard and disordered arrangement of things in nature - the rise of a hill, the wandering of a stream, the grouping of trees. Drawing and painting have been his life-long passion. Largely self-taught, he grew up with a sketch pad always handy, fashioning a studio out of a cabin in his parents backyard as a teenager. After his college career, he experimented with various mediums, falling in love with pastel in his early thirties, finding it to be the most spontaneous of mediums. Lew finds that working in the virtually pure pigment of pastel allows him to capture light and color with exciting immediacy and dynamic color. He has exhibited widely in the U.S. and Canada, has taught workshops, and been an artist in residence at public schools.

“I hope in my art, to give the viewer my feelings of wonder at the grandeur of river, bluff and plain, and make my paintings appeal to that part of each of us held hostage by the compelling beauty of the land.”