Guy Lyman
Artist's Statement: "I was working on my "Gridish" paintings (you can find them in a search on the term "Gridish" on this site) when I became engrossed with certain materials I was working with - dry pigments in particular. I had a small canvas ready to go, and shifted my attention to concentrating on just one of the rectangular forms I had been using in the Gridish series, and applying these materials in a way that pleased me. I began to create some variations on these, and this is one of them."
(the following is the Artist's Statement on the"Gridish" paintings, quite different from the one here but spawned by it.
Artist’s Statement: “As I often do, I chose a very simple form to work with in this series of paintings – a grid of rectangles. It was some Sean Scully forms I was thinking of when I started these. 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. Making the paintings is a series of minute decisions about addition and subtraction that goes on for a long time, even if the result looks deceptively simple. It’s never simple to do. These have been selling here in New Orleans before I have been able to list them, so I have been pulling out select ones 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
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.