Lewis Bodecker

 

Lewis Bodecker (1926-2009) grew up in Warsaw, Illinois but later moved to Chicago. After serving in WWII, he attended the University of Illinois, earning a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree there. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963. After retirement, he studied art for four years at Sonoma State University and taught classes there. He resided in San Rafael or Petaluma at the time of his death, in 2009. 

 

His artistic biography is equally sketchy. He was active as an artist from at least 1957, having entered two pieces in a show in February that year sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago and the City of Chicago, but he appears to have exhibited mostly north of San Francisco (although at least once in San Diego) after moving to the Bay Area, a show in December 1963 having perhaps been his first public artistic activity here. Later in life, he seems to have worked somewhat in isolation and sold his art only casually, mostly through the frame shop of Kevin Berry and Maureen Baumgartner, originally in Santa Rosa, today in Petaluma. At the time of his death, Kevin and Maureen owned the bulk of his work and it is from their collection that the pieces shown here have been chosen. 

 

Bodecker was unconventional, working with the materials at hand, but typically used acrylics on pressboard with crayon or pastel for his paintings. His drawings are mostly done in graphite and pastel. His extant work is abstract in the main, but he is known to have done some representational work as well. His compelling abstract compositions generally employ energetically applied patches of color—usually subtle, often quite dark, but sometimes vibrant—overlaid with scribbling and other linear marks, including letters and numerals. His work has a palpable energy, the energy of a man focused on the work for its own sake.

 

This exhibition on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi is his first posthumous solo show.