Bill Lewis was born in Maidstone, Kent, England. He attended Westborough Secondary Modern School and left in 1968 with no qualifications. In 1975, with his friend, Rob Earl, he started a series of poetry readings called
Outcrowd at the Lamb pub, later re-named Drakes' Crab and Oyster House, by the River Medway in Maidstone. Both Charles Thomson and Billy Childish, the later co-founders of the Stuckists group, read at these events.
He spent a year unloading trucks in Cheeseman department store in Maidstone, then in 1976 he had a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide and spent three months in Crossfield psychiatric ward, West Malling. 1977-1978, he studied Foundation Art at Medway College of Art and Design, at the same time as Childish and Philip Absolon, another future Stuckist.
In 1979, his interest in Berlin Cabaret, combined with the current punk culture, led him to joining up with Childish, Charles Thomson, Sexton Ming, Rob Earl and Miriam Carney to found the anarchic poetry performance group, The Medway Poets, which he named. The group performed in colleges, pubs and festivals, including the International Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1981. It was the subject of a TV South documentary the following year. In Lewis's performances, he "jumped on a chair, threw his arms wide (at least once hitting his head on the ceiling) and pretended he was Jesus."
In 1980, he had a show of paintings at Peter Waite's Rochester Pottery Gallery, as did Thomson, Childish, Sanchia Lewis (no relation) and Sexton Ming, the last two also founder members of the Stuckist group.
1978-82 he was the CSSD Porter at West Kent General Hospital, which provided subject matter for many of his poems at the time. He knew Tracey Emin and helped edit her short stories for her first book,
Six Turkish Tales (Hangman books 1987). Since 1982, he has been a full-time artist (though he gave up visual art at this time) with "occasional forays into tomato picking", In 1985, he was Writer-in-Residence at the Brighton Festival. In 1997, he began to make prints and paintings once more.Sherwin, Brian. "Art Space Talk: Bill Lewis", myartspace.com, 29 December 2006. Retrieved 6 April 2008.
In 1999 he was one of the founding members of the Stuckist art group along with Childish, Thomson and Ming. Lewis has been featured prominently in all the key Stuckist shows. In 2001, he taught mythology at Kent Children's University. In 2004, he was one of the fourteen "founder and featured" artists in
The Stuckists Punk Victorian held at the Walker Art Gallery for the Liverpool Biennial. He was quoted about Remodernism in the book accompanying the show:
- We think with our whole person. The mind is free from the bone prison of the skull. We are intellectuals of the heart. Just as modernist thought was affected by Einstein's Theory of Relativity (as can be seen by Picasso's paintings for instance) the New Paradigm that Re-modernism identifies itself with is one made possible by the discovery of quantum mechanics.
In 2005 he founded The Medway Delta Press. The first project was a limited edition set of 3 CDs entitled
Voices From The Medway Delta, featuring work by Billy Childish, Sexton Ming, Chris Broderick, Bill Lewis, and other names in the Medway scene. The Medway Delta Press has also published a DVD documentary by Carol Lynn on Stuckism.
He was one of the ten "leading Stuckists" in the Go West exhibition at Spectrum London gallery in October 2006.
He has had a solo show at the Rochester International Photography Festival.
