EVERY day, Gwent artist Stanley Lewis has a glass of whisky, smokes a cigar, and gets on with the task of writing his memoirs as an accompaniment to the forthcoming publication of 300 of his wartime drawings.

The rush towards publication would be tiring for a man half his age. Stanley Lewis was born in Cardiff in 1905 but came to Newport when only a few months old.

"I have been painting and drawing all my life and see no reason to stop now," says the artist with a truly breathtaking zest for life.

"A mass of pictures I drew during the war while stationed in southern England and north Wales are being put together into a book for which I shall supply my own words.

"They were most done in 1942 and 1943 when I was already middle aged," he chuckles.

"There is one picture though, I would particularly like to locate.

"During the war I was stationed with a searchlight battery at Low Ham, in Somerset, just the other sie of the Severn, and asked to paint a searchlight by the unit's commanding officer.

"All I have today is the sketch from which the oil painting was worked. The painting itself was handed over to Army who paid to have it framed but I have not seen it again nor heard of its whereabouts."

The search for the lost painting of the Low Ham searchlight is being taken up by Roger Cucksey, keeper of art at Newport's Museum and Art Gallery and the man responsible for rediscovering the artist who three years ago was leading a secluded life at Kington, on the English border, with his late wife, Min, also an artist and writer.

Mr Lewis has since moved to Saddleworth, near Oldham, Lancashire, but Mr Cucksey keeps in touch via his daughter, Jennifer. "Stanley Lewis is central to the story of 20th century Welsh art and culture. After moving to near Llanfrechfa in the 1920s he went to grammar school in Newport and from there to the Royal College of Art in London.

"His painting, The Molecatcher, which won the RCA summer exhibition in 1937, is now housed in the city's art collection.

"In the years before the last war, Stanley taught at Newport Art College and at the outbreak of war began to paint the immense mural which hangs in the Museum and Art Gallery and which depicts nurses, firemen, air raid precaution and civil defence workers and other people who were employed on the home front during the early part of the war.

"Although in his late 30s, Stanley was called up and attached to the 66th Searchlight Regiment, part of the Gloucester-shire Regiment.

"He was already well known as an artist and in addition to doing hundreds of drawings of Army life, drew a lot of one-off posters for sporting and social events.

"The drawings and pictures are a fascinating glimpse of the Army's own 'home front' -- the domestic life of men eating and drinking in the pub, undergoing medical examinations and marching, running from bombs and manning searchlights."

Mr Lewis recalls the events of 60 years ago as if they were yesterday. "They wanted a picture of a searchlight and I was told a soldier would take me to any site in Somerset or Dorset in the search for a suitable subject," he says.

"I went to three or four sites before arriving at Low Ham. It was perfect, on the edge of an old apple orchard and with Glastonbury Tor in the background.

"I was signed on as one of the searchlight crew and, after buying a canvas in Yeovil, got on with the job, most of the painting done in the open air." The year marking Stanley Lewis's centenary is also the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two.

Mr Cucksey said: "He is a living piece of the cultural history of Wales in the 20th century still working well into the 21st."