The question of how to organize the visual and conceptual data that accrete as a portrait of a person is fundamental to Lyon’s work. While he answers the query technologically, he also answers it psychically. Each portrait coalesces identity into an ambitious exchange between sitter, artist and viewer.
Pitch Weekly: Tracy Abeln Review
Kansas City printmaker Mike Lyon has established himself as a master of techniques by embracing technology to produce striking, larger-than-life portraits of people and nature.
Exhibition: Sherry Leedy – Mike Lyon: Post-Digital Prints and Drawings
The tools Lyon employs to create his delicate and beautiful images are reductive digital photography, skillful use of computers and automated inventions of his own design. Lyon’s finely made works on paper consist of rhythmic meandering lines and patterns, that refine and merge Eastern and Western artistic traditions in innovative and mindful methods to construct a body of work that is provocative and powerful and seems entirely new.
Post-Digital Printmaking
An accomplished artist and engineer, Lyon’s facility for investigating creative outcomes for new technologies pervades his endeavors. During his studies in the 1970s, exposure to computer-generated images such as Studies in Perception No. 1 by Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton, as well as the processes used in the artwork of Chuck Close, had a great influence and still resonate with him today.
Exhibition: Personal Effects at Kemper Museum
Personal Effects exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art March 23–October 12, 2012 This exhibition, drawn from works of art in the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection, explores the portrait and the still life as depictions of objects imbued with both personal meaning and wider cultural iconography. The memory of an activity stilled, a hint that someone […]
Exhibition: America Now and Here – Kansas City
Famous artist Eric Fischl and film-producer Donald Rosenfeld were in Kansas City to select work for the Kansas City Collection and selected my work. At the same time, Eric introduced the idea of America Now and Here and included my “Michael” drawing in the America Now and Here show the following year.
Exhibition: Daum Museum – Virtual Media: Computer-aided Art from the Collection
Daum exhibit shows the computer’s versatile role in modern art June 23, 2010 5:19 PM John Hansen The Sedalia Democrat An artist using a computer to create art is nothing new, yet they are always using it to push boundaries. At the Daum Museum’s “Virtual Media: Computer-aided Art from the Collection,” visitors can marvel at […]
Exhibition: Drury University: Pool Art Center Gallery Exhibit
Rebecca Miller (director of the Pool Art Center Gallery) and I first met about twenty years ago while she was a student at the Kansas City Art Institute. I was teaching karate twice a week there and she was one of my better students. During the several years she practiced with me, we became good […]
Artist’s works inspired by Japanese prints, mechanics
K-State Collegian Published: Wednesday, July 1, 2009 By Hannah Blick The emotion in Mike Lyon’s artwork is inspired by old Japanese prints. The shapes are determined by the contours of the faces of his closest friends, friendly strangers, and the outcome hinges on the mechanics of his latest digital tools. “Figuring it out: Prints and […]
Road Trip to Beach Museum and Cafe Beautiful
Sandy and Christine Kemper of The Collectors Fund organized a select group to make a road trip to see my exhibition at the Beach Museum in Manhattan, Kansas and then dine together at Cafe Beautiful in Lawrence. We gathered at 1pm at the Collectors Fund offices in Kansas City, boarded our van, and started out […]