NYAB Event - Mari Lyons “Transformations in the Garden”

Mari Lyons “Transformations in the Garden”

First Street Gallery

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FIRST STREET GALLERY presents recent paintings by Mari Lyons. This is her fourteenth show at the gallery.

In a letter to the gallery Ms. Lyons wrote of her recent series of paintings: “I am reminded of a letter that Max Beckmann (with whom I studied just before he died) wrote to a young painter. He advised her ‘to learn the forms of nature by heart, so that you can use them like the musical notes of a composition; that’s what these forms are for. Nature is a wonderful chaos to be put in order and completed.’ My recent paintings are about abstracted natural forces, or signs—engendered by observations of growth and physical processes of becoming in the natural world. I attempt to translate my responses into the language of painting. In these canvases, parts of a flower (the stem, leaves, petals) metamorphose into, for me, archetypal images. In many paintings circles predominate and, I think, the whole canvas pulsates (a circle is both a beginning and an end). I try to find, in these natural forms, parallels—in color, form, structure, and line to the dramatic energies in nature and in a constantly mutating life of forms.”

[Image: Mari Lyons “Transformations” oil on canvas, 80”x83” 2012]