Guy Lyman

Redemption in Santa Fe, 2014
Charcoal,House Paint,Acrylic Paint
30 x 40 in
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I had moved from loose, expressionistic paintings to more formal ones using circles as the basic form. Then when I moved on from this series and was thinking about what to do next, I happened to be watching a James Kalm video tour of a Joan Snyder show in New York, and the lush materiality of her paintings really inspired me. I didn't go as far as to incorporate organic materials, glitter, papier mache and such into the surface, but as you can see there are chunky areas, contrasted with very flat negative space, and also a flavor of her use of variable surface techniques. These include paint applied apparently by hand, and by brush, by rubbing and by blotting, among other techniques. There is also variation in surface gloss. So it becomes a sort of balance or symphony of surface color and texture.



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.