The interplay of colors, depth, movement and organic forms enlivens me. These are the elements that I use in my “Zephyr Series” paintings. What gives me joy and drives me is the challenge of rich colors blending and playing off each other creating a mood for the piece. My paintings are nonobjective in style, yet they have animated forms in balanced relationships to each other. Some paintings can evoke images of spidery creatures or the movement of branches in the wind. Others reflect the dancing of expressive figures in love or community.

I currently paint using acrylic on canvas sized from about two by three feet to four feet square. The size of my work has grown over the years in relation to the size of my studio. I look forward with excitement to both my studio’s and my painting’s growth. Painting big enables me to create a wide open color field that has translucent layers, depth and boundless space resulting in a feeling of the forms having unrestrained movement. I work on multiple paintings at a time.

Once the foundational field is finished, I begin the ink forms. The forms gradually develop as individuals and in relationship to each other. I use simple tools to create and literally breathe life into them.

BIO

Geoffrey Lyons is a fifth generation San Franciscan. As a child, he was surrounded by a family art collection and library initiated by both of his great grandfathers and contributed to by the generations that followed. Growing up surrounded by walls of etchings, halls with Japanese prints, rooms with classical paintings, and bookcases of century old art books he developed a deep appreciation and understanding of the world of artists and their art. Always attracted to art at museums throughout his youth, his passion for and love of art became a core value in his life.

Geoffrey was generally a fan of art and artists through most of his youth and young adulthood. He made very little art himself, but he continued to seek out numerous museum exhibits and surrounded himself with artist friends in college and beyond. He even started developing his own small collection as a child and collected his friends’ art as he became a young adult.

In his mid twenties, he started to create his own works. A unique graduate studies internship allowed him an opportunity to explore his artistic expression. He started using pastels and watercolors developing his own style working with the interplay of color, depth and movement in a non-objective manner. Over the past twenty years he has taken some formal teachings, but generally his work comes forth from his core sense of color, form and balance developed via his upbringing. He currently is painting large pieces in acrylic and ink creating backgrounds of rich colors and depth with the interplay of organic ink forms.