Charles Lyon: Artist

Wyoming

In October 2018 I spent two weeks in Wyoming at Brush Creek Ranch. Autumn was in full force with brilliantly colored foliage and unsettled weather. Being a tributary of the North Platte River, the ranch supported an abundance of monolithic cottonwood trees. Their forms and placement along the creek define the landscape and indicate where water is present and plentiful. Ochres, yellows, and cinnabars mean water and life in this harsh and arid landscape. I walked and photographed the ranch in awe of the complexity and subtlety of the color. The trees with their intense chroma became my subject as they hugged the creeks and receded into deep space.

Flowers

"I am attracted to particular flowers because of their rigorous structure and formal delicacy. Like architecture, flowers have to "stand up" and function. Although flowers appear decorative, their complex structures are for attracting the right insects and reproduction. Roses, dahlias and peonies all share an architectural quality, which is expressed through the way light and color create their unique and ethereal spaces. The opacity, translucence and transparency of the flowers' petals are forever fascinating to me, and consequently challenge me as a painter in oil and watercolor."

Rome

Statement: Ponte St. Angelo

Rome is a city of Angels. Wherever one looks, whether close up, far away, or out of the corner of one's eye, there will be one. They can be both alarming or comforting to the viewer.

As one of the most enduring representations in western art, the angel has a long and varied history. Why has it been so dominant and insistent a motif? Compassion, hope, and transcendence come to mind. Metamorphosis, too. They strike me as an extraordinary conceit in the days of the Internet.

Ponte St. Angelo spans the Tiber at a geographic nexus. The bridge has the carried the weight of thousands of pilgrims for centuries as they crossed from the old city to St. Peters. The current version of the bridge was constructed during the papacy of Pope Clement IX in 1669. He commissioned Bernini to decorate it with 10 angels and the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul. Bernini only completed two of the sculptures and his followers fabricated the remainder. Each angel carries an instrument from the passion of Christ.

While in Rome in October 2013, I went to the bridge and photographed the angels at dusk. Because of the direction of the light, half of the angels were in shadow and the other half in direct warm light. As I began this work I started with formally contrasting the lit angels with the ones in shadow in close-cropped squares as diptychs. The color has supported this approach with contrasting warm and cool colors and neutral blue skies. In the watercolors I have experimented with Styrofoam as a mark-making matrix to suggest the surface of travertine, marble, or the decaying walls I saw in Rome.

North Dakota

North Dakota is a landscape in transition. There is the pristine wilderness of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park adjacent to cattle ranches and now the Bakken Oil Boom. All of it is of interest to me as a painter as it represents the history and the future of the “West”. Luckily, I have had the opportunity of making some great friends along the way, people of great integrity and self reliance.

Snow and Ice

What I have seen in South Dakota is influencing what I see here in Minneapolis. Last winter while walking in the parking lot of my studio building, I recognized I was surrounded by snow piles that resembled some of the valleys and mountains I had been painting out West.

Although these “false” mountains were created by snow removal equipment, they had an unruly presence that was both natural and wild. The contradictions that these piles represented, this urban disposal of “nature,” attracted me to them. I was confused and elated. Snow had the power to reframe my surroundings.

As a painter I saw that snow reflects what surrounds it. It is a colorist dream and nightmare. Every surface asks for a new mixture of color, and snow will appear flat if one doesn’t work hard at these mixtures. Forms emerge when paint value and hue are carefully controlled.

The visual qualities of snow relate to those of water. Water is never the same. It reflects, shines, slides, flows and finally freezes. Snow, water's frozen cousin, has many faces too: opaque, translucent, light, heavy, reflective and even blinding.

Urban snow has often been disturbed; consequently, it is not the neat white blanket that you see in the natural world. Instead it reveals the messy tracks of what has passed over it. It holds the frozen impressions of what happened like a memory.

I like how snow obscures and abstracts the forms of the city simplifying the complex visual stimulus around us. Yet it reveals as much as it conceals. Reducing the world to a palette of grays, whites and blues makes for a pleasing harmony.

Looking at snow has made me rethink my bias of only seeing nature in the context of wilderness. It has made me ask” What does nature look like in the city?”

Badlands

I work in a naturalistic style that sometimes verges on photo-realism. My primary subject is the landscape. My fieldwork consists of some drawing and painting on site supplemented with an extensive amount of photographing. Since my residency at Badlands National Park, SD in October of 2005, the focus of my work has been that unique landscape.

The Badlands is entropy made manifest. Patterns of erosion, the chaotic signature of the wind and the rain, are everywhere in evidence. While the overall impression is desert like, actually one is looking at the prairie. The fragile greens of the grasses last only as long as there is rain. Often the prairie is a complex mixture of burnt russets, ochres and umbers.

There are very few trees, mostly junipers and cottonwoods. The colors of the many types of sediment that make up the formations are surprisingly subdued. The formations, though, reflect the color of the light in the sky; consequently whatever is happening in the sky is seen on earth as well. Almost like being on the ocean, one experiences a sense of infinity as the earth reflects the sky and the feeling of space is limitless. The horizon is the still point.

In my pastels and paintings I am representing that shifting and fragile beauty. What a surprise to see these miniature mountain ranges appear and disappear depending on the time of day and direction of light. I am structuring my work around the particular quality of light present using the irregular shadow patterns to create a visual rhythm. The landscapes vibrate between a recognizable order and an undeniable chaos.

On my recent spring visit to the Badlands I had the opportunity to observe and photograph the bison. This contact has deeply affected my understanding of the environment and my sense of purpose in representing the Park. I am now interesting in incorporating the animals in my work. As I do this the focus of the paintings shifts from the formal beauty of the land to an animate animal presence.

Wetlands

Wetlands—it is an oxymoron. I had never heard of the term until I had moved to Minnesota. It suggested something primitive, primordial maybe even inhospitable.

I wanted to find a natural subject close to home, unique to this region. A subject that was common and ubiquitious—not the sublime but the mundane. I wondered if I could make paintings of something as everyday and familiar as Cedar Lake.

One spring day I went for a walk there and what I found was not a landscape but a chaoatic scene of both decay and growth. I was attracted to this chaos of last year’s collapsed cattails with green shoots emerging. It felt very alive but I was not sure how to represent it. I took some photographs.

The photographs framed and simplfied what I saw as chaos. They helped me to focus on the pattern and the structure of light. Light could be the order by which I could structure these paintings. I grew to love the reduced palette of early spring by the lake: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, white and ultramarine blue. I wanted to follow these plants through their entire yearly cycle. That proved impossible in the time that was available.

The paintings I have made represent my visit to the edge of primordial chaos, life, which is the wetlands.