Many years ago, the artist Philip Guston took a gaggle of art students to view the Frick Collection in New York. Among his young protégés was Lewiston-born multidisciplinary artist Charlie Hewitt, who had befriended Guston while at a six-week art program at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Guston had been artist in residence. “Guston was talking very animatedly about a Goya painting and waving his hands around,” recalls Hewitt. “A guard told him he was getting too close to the painting, and Guston being Guston, he got into a big fight with the guy, cursed him out, and decided to take us to the Central Park Zoo instead.”

At the zoo, Hewitt, who was always doodling—“I have a compulsive need to draw constantly,” he concedes—made several quick drawings of some of the animals and hung them on the walls of his studio. Guston arrived the next day to critique Hewitt’s paintings but was drawn to the doodles. “He said, ‘Charlie, I think what you need is in these. I don’t know how you’re going to get there, but I think this is a way you have to go.’ It felt good to me, since I was very connected to that work,” Hewitt remembers.

Today you could say that Hewitt’s Electric Greenhouse in Portland is a monument to his doodling. The artist Paul Klee famously declared, “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” Hewitt, intentionally paraphrasing, adds, “My line went for a walk and came back with 6,000 square feet of new work that has humor and a whole new, fresh attitude.”

A few years ago, Hewitt, who also buys and sells real estate with his wife, Kate Carey, purchased a former florist shop and greenhouse on a quiet residential block in the city’s Deering neighborhood. He spent three years renovating the space himself, turning it into a studio and showroom as well as a gallery-like home for other work. Here he turns his doodles, which range far and wide in
terms of subject matter, into light art—as in electrically illuminated art.

What started it all was a wall sculpture with which Hewitt was struggling. Something about it just wasn’t jelling until he hit upon the notion of making a red linear element in the piece out of neon. The artist’s eureka moment would, in time, birth an entirely new body of work distinctly different from the prints and paintings he creates at his other studio, on Pleasant Street on the peninsula.

In 2019 Hewitt received a commission from Speedwell Contemporary in Portland to create a work for the roof of their gallery building. The result is familiar to anyone who has driven along Forest Avenue at Woodfords Corner: a 28-foot marquee sign that reads “Hopeful” in colored letters and lightbulbs. Having Neokraft Signs fabricate the piece in Lewiston reconnected Hewitt with his childhood roots, from which he’d fled to become an artist in New York.

The year 2019 proved pivotal, recentering Hewitt’s priorities and inspiring a renewed perspective on his role as an artist. “It had a lot to do with being out of the New York–centric art-world thinking,” he explains. “I recaptured something here, of being an artist and communicating. I set out at 25 to be part of the art world. But at 77 years old, I’ve dropped into a new place that’s charged.” (The pun is unintended, but the Electric Greenhouse is—quite literally—charged, with light works glowing
from every window and casting multicolored shadows on every wall.)

Shortly after the Hopeful commission, Hewitt began experimenting with an emerging art form, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and, eventually, with artificial intelligence (AI). He purchased a billboard on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel and projected some of his NFTs onto it, starting with Hopeful. That initial message landed him in the New York Times and begat a whole series of other Hopeful signs that now pepper seven states along the Eastern Seaboard, gracing multiple cities in each and
attracting many collectors.

A picture of Hopeful loomed large on a jumbotron at President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. After the Lewiston shootings, locals posed in front of the Hopeful sign on the city’s Bates Mill #5 and spread the photos throughout social media. Janet Mills cited it in her 2023 inauguration speech after being reelected governor of Maine. “These signs became a symbol, not just of survival but of health, renewal, new life,” she said from the podium in Augusta. She continued, “The sign’s creator, Charlie Hewitt, said, ‘To be hopeful is not a gift; it is a challenge. To be hopeful requires opening your eyes. It requires making a decision, being part of something.’”

Hewitt drew from his doodles—scrawled on desk calendars, in sketchbooks, on random pieces of paper—for his NFTs, which are projected onto a television screen in his Electric Greenhouse. Since launching this body of work, he has expanded it through AI. After he draws and colors one of his doodles, Hewitt uploads it into an AI software program. “I input the parameters,” he explains, “terms like ‘Picasso woodcut,’ ‘Roy Lichtenstein,’ ‘Charlie Hewitt,’ ‘linocut.’ It’s my sense of aesthetics and my brain driving the program. Sometimes it surprises me and sends me in a totally different direction.”

This is, in fact, completely natural for Hewitt, who cannot stand still creatively. “I’ve always been dying to get to a new medium I’ve never done,” he says, speaking of the NFTs. Broadening the discussion to include the entirety of his light work and the freedom the Electric Greenhouse affords him to explore it, he adds, “I’m challenged by it. And it resonates with people on a level that has nothing to do with intellect, has nothing to do with the art world. I don’t feel trapped here by anything.”

The evidence of his feverish pursuit of new media is all around him at the Greenhouse. There are freestanding forged metal sculptures also inspired by shapes from his doodles (abstracted saws and hammers, for instance, that reference the carpentry work he did to support his New York art studies). There are light sculptures and NFTs. And there are terra cotta plates on which he has doodled, embossed, and printed imagery: a crown of thorns, dice, a robe, leaves, hands. He felt compelled to make the ceramics because, he says, “Being an artist today is such a secular profession. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but there’s a lot of information in those biblical stories. Jesus was a carpenter, which was something I resonated with. There’s a lot of shorthand iconography I can pull from there.”

None of these media and genres is an island, of course. “One form informs the other. The neon sculpture led to Lewiston and Neokraft, where Hopeful came from, which led to the NFTs, which led to AI.” One can hear in Hewitt’s enthusiasm the sense of liberation he is experiencing after over a half-century of being an artist. “It’s the first time in my whole life,” he says, “that I’m able to control my own
identity and my own narrative.”

The Electric Greenhouse has clearly turned the lights of Hewitt’s soul on full blast. The future is looking bright.

Open by appointment: [email protected].