Rob Lyon
b. 1982, United Kingdom
Rob Lyon (b. 1982 Lancashire, UK) lives and works in Sussex, UK. He has Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Law from Bristol University, UK. Lyon is a self-taught painter, who has been developing his practice over the past decade. The Sussex landscape is an anchoring point for the artist, who spent his childhood on the Downs and returned as an adult. The paintings, although drawn from Lyon’s locale, are imagined landscapes. Expanding on Paul Nash’s concept of ‘genius loci’ – the spirit of place, Lyon thinks about how we as visitors activate the landscape and how the landscape activates us. Walking, looking, and recalling this ‘activation’ are key to the process of making each painting.
Lyon has crafted a distinct style, creating his own visual lexicon of mark making and motifs, from dots, dashes, triangles, and crosses to more referential repetitions of clouds, birds, and tree shapes. His compositions inherit the rhythm, texture, and counterpoint learnt through writing music in his twenties.[1] Developed from sketches, his paintings become complex arrangements of trees, burial mounds, and unregimented grids of fields. Simplified and reassembled, there is a tension between expression and control.
There is a sense of unity and a transformative nature to the paintings. Pockets of light and airy space evoke an absence, omission, or clearing. Lyon has come to see these spaces as representations of portals that combine as a measure of consecrated land, giving form to the notion that the landscape is a temple of sorts. He meditates on energy states of grief, loss, joy and ecstasy in connection to these portals in the landscape, through which we are ‘transformed but continuous, elusive, reverberating echoes, a reversible reaction between becoming and ceasing, in a perpetual state of resonance.’ (Lyon, 2023)
Lyon has had exhibitions at Warwick Arts Center, UK; Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona Spain; Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon, USA: Wondering People, London, UK; Gallery 94, Glyndebourne, UK; Blakefest 2020 and 2017, Bognor Regis, UK; the Warbling Collective, London, UK.