A Life Collected

Over a remarkable career and a lifetime of travel, Bob has visited 133 countries, encountering different cultures, people, landscapes, galleries, markets, artists, and objects along the way. From those experiences grew an extensive and deeply personal art collection, assembled not around a single movement or period, but around something much simpler: Bob collected what interested him.

His collection includes works by Marcel Mouly, Gary Komarin, Claude Hemeret, and many others. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, and objects discovered across decades of travel tell the story of someone who has remained endlessly curious about the world around him.

“I love buying things,” Bob told me with a laugh. “I love shopping.”

Spend time with the collection and something more becomes apparent. Bob has an eye for color, energy, unusual forms, and objects with personality. The collection is eclectic because the life behind it has been eclectic.

Blue Narcissus by Gary Komarin

Then, unexpectedly, collecting led to creating.

Bob’s daughter and son-in-law were living with him when his son-in-law gave him brushes and tubes of paint and suggested that he try painting during the late nights when Bob was often awake.

Bob took him up on it.

“I only painted for one year,” he remembers, “but I did it every single night.”

With no formal art training, Bob approached painting much as he seems to approach life: with curiosity and a willingness to discover what happens next.

“When I paint, I don’t look at something and say, ‘I’m going to paint this.’ I just paint whatever’s in my head.”

The paintings that emerged are colorful, imaginative, and distinctly Bob. They add another dimension to a life already shaped by looking at, living with, and loving art.

Untitled by Bob Lewis

A Life Collected brings Bob’s paintings into conversation with selected works from the collection he assembled while traveling the world. It celebrates the relationship between seeing and making, collecting and creating, experience and imagination.

During our conversation, Bob said something that perhaps describes the collection, the paintings, and the man equally well:

“I’m interested, man.”

That curiosity has taken Bob Lewis around the world. It has helped him build businesses, discover art, assemble a remarkable collection, and eventually pick up a paintbrush himself.

Untitled by Bob Lewis

Presented at the Dentons Cohen & Grigsby Gallery, A Life Collected celebrates that journey and a life enriched by the simple act of continuing to look, discover, collect, and create.

Written by Mark Rengers, Mark Rengers Gallery