Guy Lyman

Gridish #28, 2022
House Paint, Acrylic, Lacquer, Charcoal
29 x 23 in
SOLD
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The camera insists on adding a bluish tint to these paintings, which isn't there in person.

Artist’s Statement: “As I often do, I chose a very simple form to work with here – a grid of rectangles. Content never interests me much, and I don’t spend time thinking about it. I’m interested in the balance of assonant and dissonant colors, line quality, texture and impasto, push and pull, these sorts of issues. This one is reminiscent of an earlier painting I sold that was simpler than the others in the "Gridish" series, with less going on inside the oval forms and concentrating more on the balance of colors. Instead I ended up merely building up the white paint within the rectangles and adding a very slight tint to the negative space. I find these to be happy paintings, in a time that's been less than happy. These have been selling here in New Orleans before I have been able to list them, so I have been pulling out a few to show only online, so that collectors of my work elsewhere and new folks get a chance to see them."

(On prior series by the artist): “These paintings are a refreshing departure from the current abstract art world’s seemingly endless parade of fields of color with scribbles providing form, a style that is easily mimicked and has become a sort of “safe,” accessible go-to. There are confident decisions in these paintings appearing as commitments of strongly delineated forms and unexpected collisions of color that give the work a visceral, confident and playful soul, increasingly missing from contemporary expressionist abstraction. They are the paintings of a real painter rather than a decorative artist.”

ArtSeen, 2018

Comes pre-framed and ready to hang, in a maple floater frame.


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.