Peter Lyons
American Spring
April 30, 2016 – May 30, 2016
- This event has passed.
Trident Gallery is very pleased to present American Spring, an exhibition of fifteen landscape paintings in oil by Peter Lyons, a native of New Zealand residing in Natick MA. American Spring is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Trident Gallery. Six large paintings in the exhibition are major works, representing the artist at the height of his creative power and focused vision.
Gallery hours duiring the exhibition are Saturday 10–7; Friday, Sunday, and Monday 10–5; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday 12–5, and by appointment. The gallery will host a public reception for the artist on Saturday, May 7, 6–8pm.
Lyons’s painting technique approaches photographic realism, but surreal and otherworldly elements—strangely bright colors, odd anachronisms, unusual or exaggerated perspective, an unexpected cloud— suggest that the artist’s meticulous visual representations are a means to suggest ideas and feelings beyond the apprehension of the senses. The human figure is absent; the narrative and emotionally transformative elements of the scene are light, sky, and bodies of water.
In these respects, Lyons’s paintings recall the work of the group of mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painters later called Luminists, whom Lyons regards with deep sympathy. As the label suggests, painted light may be seen as the principal subject and agent within Lyon’s paintings: “When bathed in this elevating light,” he says, “the beauty in the ordinary is released, and the image acts as a lens focusing awareness of wonder, joy, and spiritual anticipation in the viewer.”
Peter Lyons (b. 1960) studied physics in New Zealand before devoting himself to painting. He moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and to the Boston area in 1996. Solo exhibitions of his paintings have been presented at the Richard York Gallery and Meredith Ward Fine Art in New York City, at Paul Dietrich Gallery in Cambridge, and at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. Lyons’s paintings are in the Saundra B. Lane Collection, the Boston Athenaeum, and significant private collections.
David Dearinger, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum, likens Lyons’s paintings to those of Edward Hopper in having the quality of being “as real or surreal as the perception and imagination of the viewer allows (or needs) it to be.” Theodore E. Stebbins, Former Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and former Curator of American Art at the Fogg Museum, writes that Lyons’s paintings “look somehow familiar, but they are distinctive, different, memorable…they have both strength and credibility.”