T he present work is an excellent example of the veristic Surrealist canvases for which Doris Lindo Lewis has received increasing critical acclaim. Among the first North American artists to embrace Surrealism, Lewis is celebrated as a forerunner of female Surrealism around the world. As both an environmental activist and a female artist in a male-dominated movement, Lewis is known for her explorations of fertility, creation, and a woman’s place within the natural world – all notions which figure prominently in the present works: The Morning and The Evening.

Born in San Jose, Costa Rica, Lewis moved between the Caribbean, Massachusetts, Cuba and eventually South Florida over the course of her life, never leaving behind the influence of any one place. She began her career working in the Impressionist style, painting landscapes of Cape Cod while she lived and studied in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a young girl. But those familiar coastal scenes soon transformed into the Surrealist visions of nature depicted in the present works.

The setting shared by The Morning and The Evening is at once ambiguous and perfectly legible - possibly a barren desert beneath a menacing sky or the ocean floor beneath a stormy sea. It is a dreamlike landscape, not reminiscent of any place in particular, but rather suggestive of a mystical in-between. As denoted by their titles, these two works convey the passage of t.mes , but as with the confused sense of place, there is no context within the compositions to suggest whether day proceeds to night, or night to day. It is a world of Lewis’s own invention that exists within but defies the conventions of the world with which we are familiar.

The objects depicted within the present works seem to allude to a deconstructed circle of life. In The Morning, Lewis represents birth in the sproutlets growing in the foreground, life in the leafy head of cauliflower on the right side of the canvas and death in the skeletal vertebrae resting on the left. The same can be said of the drifting seedlings, the stalky plant and the prehistoric horseshoe crab that make up the composition of The Evening. She takes the notion that “God created man in his own image” and conjects that so too did woman create nature in hers.

The hands featured in both paintings draw a striking parallel to those at the center of Michelangelo’s iconic fresco in the Sistine Chapel. In the present works, however, Lewis seems to replace the hands of God and of Adam with those of a woman, positing her diptych as a sort of reconception of the story of the Creation. Where God, as depicted in Michelangelo’s work, reaches out to impart the spark of life into man, Lewis here depicts a feminized God imbued with the generative power of nature.

The fragmented female body is a recurring motif within Surrealism. This is evident in both the title and composition of Rene Magritte’s The Eternally Obvious, wherein he depicts a woman’s body through a series of frames separated by seemingly unbridgeable gaps. The depiction of the female body within the larger Surrealist oeuvre was likewise filtered through the gaze of the male artists who dominated the movement. It was thus the project of Lewis and the female Surrealists who succeeded her to reposition and empower the notion of the feminine within Surrealism.

In the present works, Lewis positions the fragments of the female body - the hands - as a metonym for the woman herself. In Blue Prayer, painted around the same t.mes as the present works, Lewis dismembers the female body so as to reconstruct it in her own vision. She depicts a woman kneeling, with her hands raised and the soles of her feet exposed, replacing her torso with a potted flower. The work of fellow female surrealists, such as Remedios Varo and Georgia O'Keeffe, similarly depict fantastical worlds born of the artist's imagination, often featuring female protagonists. The present works attest to Lewis' avant-garde style - a pioneer working against the conventions of Surrealism which had only just begun to take shape.