G. Campbell Lyman

Santa Fe Series #6 (Contemporary Abstract Painting)

1997

(Comes framed in a deep-profile maple or black floater frame, ready to hang.) Artist's Statement: "This painting harkens back to my 'Gridish' series but with more negative space, a broader array of media and more complexity to the oval forms. I have tried to create tension between these iconic forms through the divergence of dissonant and unusual materials, colors and textures. These ovals keep reappearing in my work; they seem almost like groups of silent but sentient beings to me." “Lyman’s work evolves restlessly, with the common elements generally being deft and unusual color choices that balance assonance and dissonance, and vestiges of the hand and facture purposely left in the paintings. The negative space is often so meticulously worked that it’s almost as if the objects – usually simple shapes – are there as much to complement the background as vice versa. Despite the often bold colors there is an elegance about his paintings that prevents them from being either loud or decorative. " Artbeit Zeitschrift “His 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 (from a collector): "Love your work. We collect colorists like Wolf Kahn and Jennifer Bartlett, whom I commissioned a piece from that is in the entrance of Mayo Clinic. We are old fans...

Artist's Statement: "Around 30 years ago, not long after I had started painting seriously, I was at a one-man exhibition of the great Brice Marden at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art when I visited the annex to get a cocktail. There was one other guy at the small bar table in an otherwise empty room, waiting for his coffee to be handed to him. He turned and dumped half of it down my front. I immediately recognized him as none other than Brice Marden. He apologized profusely, but I stopped him and said: 'No problem: how often is it that Brice Marden dumps coffee on your pants? They're worth more now.' We both had a good laugh. At any rate - I was certainly channeling his early work when I began work on this series. They are made with oil and beeswax on wood panels...

DNA is genetic information, hidden and encrypted in body fluids. Veiled data that we load, that we do not know and that someone knows how to decipher. Such specifications characteriz...

Remembering moments that were so very close to horrific, but the fortune to live in the probability that it did not.