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Born in 1936 in Rutland, Vermont, Francis Hewitt was a consummate intellectual artist who explored the mind-bending potential of form and color in a multidisciplinary fashion. During his teenage years, Hewitt studied with local artist Stuart Eldridge and became the art editor for his high school yearbook as well as the editor and a cartoonist for the school newspaper. He first really delved into producing his signature abstract, geometric compositions while studying in the 1950s at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where there was a decided focus on Bauhaus theory and practice. The curriculum blended artistic and scientific experimentation in a way that stimulated the nascent Op artist.

While at Carnegie, Hewitt befriended classmate Ed Mieczkowski and the two eventually taught a Dimensional Drawing course at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1960, the same year they founded the Anonima Group with Ernst Benkert. Hewitt did postgraduate work at Oberlin College and earned a PhD in aesthetics and the psychology of perception at Case Western Reserve University. During the late 1960s, Hewitt taught at the Cooper Union and Pratt Institute in New York. In 1970, Hewitt returned to Vermont for good to teach at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

Following a 1971 retrospective on the Anonima Group at the University of Vermont, Hewitt constructed a large studio on 100 acres of land in rural East Corinth, near the capital Montpelier. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hewitt continued pushing the boundaries of color with various series that drew inspiration from the local scenery and Vermont's state flag. Prior to his passing in 1992, Hewitt was included in the 1988 traveling exhibition, Geometric Abstraction: A Cleveland Tradition, organized by the Cleveland Institute of Art. Today works by Hewitt are held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museo de Artes Contemperaneo in Buenos Aires, and the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland.