Chris Lyon - Two Hundred Seventy Degrees

Artist Statement/Chris Lyon (Chris Lyon Journal entries edited by Alexis Serio)

Everything. Dream. Reality. Fantasy.

My paintings are a conscious reaction to the relationship between some of my dreams and fantasies to my physical realities. I am interested in the abstract connectivity of things. I am painting things that run through my mind when I am sleeping, day dreaming and when I close my eyes in the day, sometimes I see things in a vivid sparkling intense web.

Then, there is the act of painting.

I am trying to make complicated multilayered multifaceted dynamic paintings with gruff facility. I am painting towards an arcane beauty. Simultaneously combining complication and simplicity in the imagery intrigues me and drives the impulse to make and finish each painting.

Beautiful Nonsense.

There is a deep heart felt connectivity that amounts more to sight and touch. In some situations, there is an undeniable bond stripped of all the crap that others tell us we need to get through whatever it is that we have to get through. The intertwining vigor is made to be a battle to struggle against, but why.

An effort to encapsulate my ambiguous knowledge.

I have had the impulse to directly connect my work to something that is slightly more concrete in representing specific objects and being sincere about what they are psychologically to me. My first step was to go from looking at my paintings and saying, "This blue could be representing sky or water," to "this blue represents sky in this instance." I will be more in touch with what a color, shape and gestured mark mean instead of looking at it as a mysterious anomaly.

Blue as womb.

The red headed light floating figure is one that has faded in and out of my imagery for the past fifteen years. It represents a light free passionate good feeling. It is a whole energetic complete and happy full feeling that I sometimes feel in my chest. The idea of attractive human should be there but in a transparent manner that is more indicative of feeling. It keeps the figures whole, but still gives them a solid see through quality. It is a lovely paradox. There is also a conveyed sense that things exist, but they are not real.

Open up imagery to dream something.

The titles are turning into themes for a dream I had, a fantastic outlandish ridiculous thought that popped into my head or the place that the image takes me in terms of thought process when I look at it. Everything, everywhere and everyone doesn't need to be comfortable all the time to be good.

Connecting nothing to something should be possible.

Chris Lyon's Statement for BULDUCKO
Edited by Alexis Serio

"Bull, Taco and the Duck" (Bulducko) has begun as a deep passion towards the ideals and personification given to machines. There is an animal relationship or instinct involved with thinking about the visual experience of a motorcycle. It is a unique visual experience that seems to have a connection to Plato's idea of beauty. The feeling is overhead, under, all around, gripping, calculated danger and simmering excitement. It can be exhilarating standing still or zooming by at 208 miles per hour. Paint that. The idea is specific and a little bit off track with the other paintings, but should reveal a continuity at some point.

Bulducko has a combination sensibility of things hanging, standing up and flying through. A transparent winged figure is trying to work its way in. The tightly knit connectivity needs to be expressed, because it feels like a primary internal driving force.
This one feels like it should move deep dark and heavy. It should have a dark jumpy nightclub feeling. It contains things of passion. It has a roughness, clumsiness and awkwardness which seem authentic. Bulducko should get crowded and overwhelming to add an idea to the other thing that could be happening in the paintings. It speaks to the other thing: being a moaning, passionate deep inside moving operatic swelling.

Obstacle
Entanglement
Dilemma
Web
Convolution
Elaboration
Intricacy
Multiplicity
Ramification

Chris Lyon - Statement

Coming from a figurative background, I sought to reach multiple figure compositions. After repeatedly making compositions with a five-figure parameter, six, seven, and eight figures jumped in. This continued until I made a meditative departure to include a mass of some form of mankind. Now there are so many figures, one can not be easily deciphered from the other.

My paintings continue to be derivatives from the human form. I think of my work as being a great spiritual manifestation, a place of heightened awareness of the supernatural. The imagery can be thought of as groups of spirits performing acts of love and violence in a dimension where the interactions resolve without pain. The lines shape fragments of people and the colors decide the tone of excitement; they survive in clusters, strewn into physical, emotional, or spiritual states. There are wholes, remnants, and representations of the different ways humans exist and are perceived to exist.

The imagery in my work is the essence of my self. It is an abstraction of my perceptions of the way the world is and the way I would like it to be. I use subconscious feelings and non-verbalized ideas about subjects that live deeply in my mind. I paint and think laterally, toward naming objects, and then move forward intuitively, relying on peripheral vision so as not to run into a wall. My work is devoid of the contrived and controlled that are functions of the rational mind. My paintings contain the energy and flow that a poet puts into words and a composer puts into music. In delivery there is direct intention, obsession, intensity, speed, and reverence. I want to embellish the idea of epic.

My most recent direction is architectural. I make a classical reference of a circle within a square or more specifically, a dome-like sphere. The circular scope may have relations to the void of the hole in the pantheon or a vaulted ceiling fresco. The forms function freely and energetically in a refined structured space. Moving forward with my previous statement and new reference in architecture, I intend on creating a perfect harmony of balance containing imbalance.

Essays:
>CLICK ON LINK'S BELOW TO READ SELECTED ESSAYS:

>LILLY WEI 2007
>GERARD BROWN 2005
>SUSANNA JACOBSON 2003