At RISD Buck Lewis learned to value process—something he now uses to bring memorable characters to life in some of the best animated features made in the US.
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ILLUST R AT I O N
Buck Lewis BFA 81
by Francie Latour I n 1988 B uc k L ewi s f i n ally got ev ery t h i n g h e h ad
ev er wa n t ed. Just shy of 30, he walked away from an award-winning career in advertising and a client roster that included American Express, HBO, IBM and Sony. He fled Manhattan for a Connecticut farmhouse on 100 acres. It had a circa-1750 chimney, a 35-foot-long artist’s studio with vaulted ceilings and offered all the tranquility he would need to answer his true calling: to become a painter. Three months later, he fell into a black hole of depression. “I was one of those people who was like, ‘Someday I’m going to paint. Someday, I’m going to get out of this rat-race with all this commercial bogus bullshit and do something that’s pure,’” Lewis says, with all the idealism of that 29-year-old self coming through in his 52-year-old voice. “I was fortunate enough to reach the point where I could actually get what I wished for, and see what that felt like. And it was scary.” It was scary for a few reasons. One, Lewis found out he wasn’t very skilled as a painter. Even worse, it dawned on him that in this static medium, he had nothing relevant to say. But the worst realization of all came one night when he went to the movies, and settled in to watch the animated classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit? When it was over, he realized that at 30 years old, he had gotten his true calling all wrong. “I could feel the appetite right away, like, ‘I want to do that,’” Lewis recalls. “And as soon as I felt it, I thought, here I am in
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