Description

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, including the title painting, American Spring (2013, 30 x 40 in.), and Mondo Exotica (2015, 40 x 72 in.) the largest work in the exhibition, which depicts a leopard-patterned train car passing through a tropical landscape. Peter Lyons: American Spring will be on view from April 30 through May 30. Gallery hours 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 convey 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 locales varying from recognizable scenes in Cambridge MA and coastal New England to unidentified places in the American west and South America. In these respects, Lyons's paintings recall the work of the Hudson River School painters of American landscapes in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly the more tranquil paintings by Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, and Frederic Edwin Church, whom Lyons regards with deep sympathy. In these tranquil paintings, which later critics distinguished and labeled ''luminist,'' light may be seen as the principal subject and agent within the landscape. ''When bathed in this elevating lig