By David Rolland

Artist and fisherman Clayton Lewis, a 31-year resident of Laird's Landing on Tomales Bay, died at home last Friday night of cancer. He was 80.

"His family was gathered around him" at 11:30 p.m. when he closed his eyes for the last time, said his son Peter Lewis this week. "It was a really beautiful thing. He died very peacefully."

Friends of Mr. Lewis have been invited to celebrate his life with a potluck memorial at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 24, at Laird's Landing. Those interested have been asked to carpool and park at the top of the dirt road or arrive by boat.

Although many West Marin residents knew Lewis as "the old man of the sea" who fished and boated on Tomales Bay for three decades, his son said, his greatest love was art.

The furniture designs of Mr. Lewis' defunct furniture company, Claywood Design, were featured in magazines such as Fortune, Life, and Architectural Forum.

"That put us on the big market," Mr. Lewis said last week in an interview with The Light at Laird's Landing. "[It was] a Horatio Alger story -- people love it."

Nonetheless, Mr. Lewis turned his back on financial success. He preferred instead to pursue a tranquil life of art and wilderness, and he found success in his relationships with a vast network of close friends.

"We will appreciate the loss when we look around for Clayton at the bakery and he's not there," said his friend Richard Kirschman of Dogtown this week.

He gave his children a "rich, full life" loaded with Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, classical and ethnic music, and art, said his son Peter. "He used to sing to us when we were kids. My father was extremely poetic."

Friend Marianne Wiener added, "If there was such a thing as a real gentleman, it was Clayton. He was extremely considerate in all kinds of relations."

Born on March 15, 1915, Mr. Lewis grew up in the rural logging town of Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, about 20 miles east of Seattle.

At the time, Snoqualmie Falls was home to 200 people who were "back-country folk, provincial to say the least," Mr. Lewis recalled a week ago, adding that many residents "drank beer for exercise...

Mr. Lewis described his father Charles as a large "square-rigged sailor who ran away to sea when he was 10 years old" but later settled down to become a hydraulic engineer for the town's power plant.

He said his father was a "well-meaning man" who nonetheless ruled his home with a iron hand.

"My sexual education was conducted by my father," Mr. Lewis recalled. "He said to me, 'If you go and get any of these girls around here pregnant, I'm going to take you out in the backyard and blow your head off with a shotgun.'

"How would you like that at 13 years old?"

Mr. Lewis told The Light that he bought a small plot of land from the City of Eugene during World War II, but the family had no money to build a house.

He hauled 8,000 feet of lumber home from the local mill's reject pile, and "whittled on it," Mr. Lewis said. With that lumber, he built a house and all his furniture.

"The neighbors were entranced, so they said, 'Make me some,'" he recalled. "So we made some for them, and in a matter of a year, we'd formed a corporation [Claywood Design], and we had a furniture factory going in an old barn up there."

A self-described "lousy businessman," Mr. Lewis didn't fare well with Claywood Designs over the long haul. The company went under, and Mr. Lewis was hospitalized with osteoporosis, a bone disease that had previously afflicted him in his teens.

While he was in Venice, Mr. Lewis worked with acclaimed furniture designers Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson.

And the company prospered. The Venice factory had started in 1950 with five employees. By 1953 when Mr. Lewis left, there were two factories and 85 employees.

Although he "made a lot of money," Mr. Lewis was disenchanted with being an administrator. He wanted to create.

"[Being an artist is] a disease," Mr. Lewis said. "A disease is something you can't control; it controls you.

"You're moved by inspiration. You're moved by the disease. You're moved by the idea of recreating the world in an image which you prefer to think of as -- maybe not preferable -- but variable."

Having trouble paying the bills, he and his wife Virginia split up. Mr. Lewis moved to Nevada City, Nevada County, where he taught art and performed other odd jobs.

But money problems persisted, and Mr. Lewis' brother-in-law had him thrown in jail for failing to pay child support.

"Up there you were lucky if you got a job that paid you $2.25 an hour," he recalled. "I worked for a lot of time cleaning out bars after two o'clock in the morning for $2.50 for the whole goddamn job."

However, Tomales Bay changed Mr. Lewis' life in 1964. He and his companion Judy Perlman and her infant son Marcos on the Fourth of July paid a visit to one of Mr. Lewis' friends, former Marshall resident Alex Crighton.

He contacted the owner of the property, the late Murray Richards, and offered to fix up the buildings, which had been built by Miwok Indians sometime around 1830, for $5 an hour and the privilege to live there. Richards agreed.

Over the years living at Laird's Landing, Mr. Lewis renovated the buildings, built himself an art studio and a foundry, made jewelry which he sold by mail and on trips, and he fished with his seining net.

"It was a nice, wild place to be," Mr. Lewis said. "If you live in a place for a long time -- and I consider 30 years a long time -- you fall in love with it."

However, Lewis successfully argued that since he had built an art studio and therefore owned it, the Park Service was obliged to buy it or allow him to stay.

Mr. Lewis remained devoted to his mother Rosie throughout her life, and when she became ill in the 1970s, she asked him to move back to Washington and live with her.

Not wanting to leave Tomales Bay, Mr. Lewis instead wrote letters to her daily and illustrated the envelopes. After a while, the drawings became so elaborate and colorful that in 1983 they found their way into an exhibit of the California Historical Society.

In his last few weeks, Lewis dedicated all his time to helping organize the Clayton Lewis Foundation -- Art and Sciences on Tomales Bay, a nonprofit that his friends and family hope will provide educational tours on the bay.

Those interested can make donations to the foundation at the Bank of Petaluma in Point Reyes Station.

Mr. Lewis is survived by his children Susannah Lewis and Thomas Harding Lewis, both of Seattle; Katherine Rose Lewis of Kingston, Washington; and Peter Scott Lewis of San Francisco; his grandchildren Michael Thomas Rosen of Los Angeles and Anja McElvaney of New York; his wife Jonne Lemieux of Inverness; and his stepchildren CC Lemieux of Inverness, Jason Lemieux of Colorado, and Adam Lemieux of Hawaii.