Guy Lyman

De Gustibus, 2022
Charcoal, Oil Crayon, Oil, Acrylic
36 x 24 in
$2,240
PurchaseMake an OfferInquire
"I have been painting seriously for somewhere around 35 years, but have only ever sold regionally - most recently, through my gallery on Magazine Street in New Orleans. I am now (thankfully) able to reach a worldwide audience and have sold paintings to collectors in places like London, Madrid and Beirut, which is gratifying to me. So I am going to begin reserving some of my work to offer here first. In my paintings, I use a variety of media - nearly always oil and acrylic, but often wax, tar and other materials. This series of paintings is primarily about the surface and materials, which have always been my chief interest. The "objects" are mostly something to wrap the paint around. I am as interested in the negative space as the positive, and spend a lot of time on the layering, taking out and covering up, wiping and scraping, modulating color, texture and sheen, to get it where I want it. I have fingers in the paint as often as brushes. This one turned out to be in my opinion among the best paintings I have ever made; I fought with it for quite awhile, and in the long run it just worked really well, the coloration in particular."

Painted on gallery-wrapped deep profile canvas, ready to hang.


I have been painting for about 30 years, since before I was a dealer. I always was and remain most drawn to so-called “painterly” painters, whose interest is less in the formal aspects of painting than in the paint itself, and signs of the artist’s hand in its application. Initially I was drawn to paintings from the magical period between New York Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and Cy Twombly. In the Eighties, it was New York neo-Expressionists such as Julian Schnabel, Terry Winters and Donald Baechler. As you can see, in the past few years my paintings have become more formal, but you can still see a lot of the hand in them. I grew up in New Orleans, lived in various places in the U.S. and Europe, then returned to "the Big Easy" to open my Magazine Street gallery, which I sold in 2017 before moving my art business entirely online. I still enjoy meeting fellow art collectors and painters when they visit New Orleans.