Guy Lyman

Observations in Passing, 2022
Oil Crayon, Oil, Acrylic
36 x 36 in
SOLD
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"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. As a dealer, I am now able to reach a worldwide audience; I have recently sold paintings to collectors in London, Madrid, Beirut, even to owners of a notable Chardonnay vineyard, and it is pleasing to know my "offspring" are out there in the world at large. So I am going to begin reserving some of my work to offer here. 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 (more to come) are 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 end up with my fingers in the paint as often as brushes."



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.