“Heather in Red and Green” 100 x 50 cm Oil on canvas 2014 Winner of the Arnold Clark award at the 128th Annual Exhibition of the Paisley Art Institute in 2015) – NFS Lewis MacKenzie (b. 1981) is a contemporary impressionist painter based near Glasgow in Scotland. His work features in numerous private collections and has appeared in exhibitions by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Royal Glasgow Institute and the Paisley Art Institute, as well as in several private art galleries in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. In 2023, he appeared on Sky Portrait Artist of the Year, was shortlisted for the Inaugural Scottish Landscape Awards, and was awarded the Murray and McGregor Prize at the Scottish Prize for Fine Art. An art school drop-out, Lewis trained as a biologist and worked for several years in a cancer lab before rekindling his lifelong love of drawing and painting in the early 2010s. He draws influences from the masters of past eras, such as Velasquez, Vermeer, Guthrie, Sargent, and the Boston School Impressionists. His interests range from portraiture to still life and landscape.   ARTIST’S STATEMENT I am a contemporary impressionist painter, which is to say that I am a painter of light. I work primarily within the tradition of naturalistic representational painting because I feel that this art form is timeless and has the power to speak simply and directly to universal aspects of human experience. You could say that my paintings are an attempt to communicate my care for the world and my endless fascination with its visual aspect. To me, the visual world is a symphony of unaccountable and astonishing richness – even the most tawdry or quotidian subject can be a source of wonder and amazement. In my work, I try to draw forth the poetic…