Ffiona Lewis

Ffiona Lewis (b. 1964) is a British painter whose work moves between landscape, still life and abstraction, often drawing on the coasts, gardens and countryside of Suffolk and Cornwall. Her paintings are characterised by strong underlying structure, layered surfaces and a highly personal use of colour, frequently suggesting human presence through the objects, buildings and traces people leave behind rather than through figures themselves.

Lewis initially trained as an architect, qualifying in 1990 after studying at the Polytechnic of Central London. Increasingly drawn towards painting, she subsequently studied drawing and painting at Central Saint Martins and worked for a period in the paint-frame and props departments at the National Theatre. Her architectural training remains evident in the underlying geometry and careful organisation of many of her compositions.

After deciding to concentrate on painting, Lewis met the St Ives artist John Wells, who introduced her to artists including Patrick Heron and Terry Frost. In 1996 her work was included in Marion Whybrow’s Another View: Art in St Ives, alongside Sandra Blow, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Martin Lanyon. Lewis has been represented by The Redfern Gallery since 1994 and first exhibited at the gallery in 1999.

Lewis frequently paints on timber panels which she prepares with layers of gesso, primers, grounds and textured media. Paint may then be applied, dragged across the surface or removed with a palette knife, while the board itself is sometimes scratched or incised. Her working process can be prolonged: an observed subject may pass through sketchbook drawings, mock-ups and what she calls “contact sheets” before being distilled into the finished work.

Her paintings often occupy a point between figuration and abstraction. Andrew Lambirth has observed that Lewis tends to paint “the evidence that people leave behind, or their trace in the landscape rather than the people themselves”. Lewis herself has described “smallness, localness, emptiness” as qualities that particularly attract her. Coastlines, lighthouses, birds, trees, gardens, pots and domestic objects recur throughout her work, reduced and reorganised through colour, texture and pattern.

In recent years Lewis’s work has increasingly reflected her life on a small farm in coastal Suffolk and her interest in the restoration and interdependence of natural environments. Her 2023 exhibition Harris Machair developed from repeated journeys to the Outer Hebrides while she was restoring the farm, finding parallels between Suffolk planting and pond-making and the intricate ecosystems, rock pools, bird life and textile traditions of Barra, the Uists, Harris and Lewis.

Her practice has also expanded beyond painting. In 2026 Britten Pears Arts invited Lewis to create Slung Mugs at Snape Maltings, an exhibition inspired by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears’s home, garden and archive at The Red House in Aldeburgh. Taking its title from an instrument devised by Britten for Noye’s Fludde, the exhibition brought together oil paintings, weavings, wool works and photographs, reflecting Lewis’s response to the domestic and creative environment in which Britten and Pears lived and worked.

Lewis has exhibited widely, with her work selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition and the Discerning Eye. Museum exhibitions have included The Art of the Tree at St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in 2016 and Capture the Castle at Southampton City Art Gallery in 2017. She previously held a solo exhibition at Snape Maltings in 2018, supported by Arts Council England. A group of her Suffolk coastal paintings is held in the Parliamentary Art Collection.