Visiting With Tim & Lola Lewis, July 25, 2025

I had an interesting and fun visit with Appalachian Artist Tim Lewis and his wife Lola yesterday, July 25, 2025, in their home in Elliott County Kentucky. I have known Tim for a couple of years and known about his art for a bit longer than that. Tim is a cousin of the famed Minnie Adkins but his art work is his own and his reputation as an artist is perfectly capable of standing on its own two feet. Tim has primarly been a sculptor in stone for many years but also does wonderful carved and painted wooden birds. I am proud to say that I now have two of those Tim Lewis birds in my own collection. They are actually representations of the Evening Grosbeaks which visited our home for about two months nearly two years ago. Tim had recently completed those two birds for me and we had talked at the recent Minnie Adkins Day celebration in Sandy Hook. But we had also spoken about getting together sometime soon for a while and I decided to take a hot summer drive to Tim's house for a visit.

That drive to the visit was an adventure in itself. Tim's house is not easy to locate even for a person like me who has spent his life in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia. It is located on a back road, up a sizeable hill, and situated in a tree shaded location where it is not possible to see it from the road. But I finally got there and it was worth the trip.

I had also taken a photograph of both grosebeaks together near a wall outlet in order to be able to show them as a pair and to give an indication of their size. This is that photograph.

While I was at Tim's house, he and Lola and I talked about a variety of topics including a lot of art, mostly art actually, and they also showed me several pieces of art from their collection including a small piece by the famed folk artist Howard Finster. They have an excellent carved and painted Native American Chief which Tim created many years ago, a nice little piece of a carved alabaster angel which was Lola said was the first piece Tim ever carved and gave to her when their relationship was young. The house is full of art, exhibition catalogues, and excellent memories. In a wonderful act of generosity, they gave me a copy of a catalogue from a series of traveling exhibitions of Tim's work from 2008 and 2009. Yes, they did have a few extra copies of that catalogue from the past. It contains a wonderful group of photographs of Tim's works from that time period, several very interesting and insightful articles about Tim and his work, and it is truly enlightening to study if you are into the stone carvings of Tim Lewis. It was a truly great visit!