Charles Lyon is a Minneapolis artist originally from California and Connecticut. At Bennington College in Vermont he studied black and white photography specializing in the landscape. After college Charles spent many years in the high Arizona desert teaching climbing, kayaking and photography. Years in the wild opened him to the possibilities of color. He worked in textiles for several years and them moved to pastels. When he moved to Minneapolis in 1994 with his family, he returned to school to study drawing and painting and earned his MFA from MCAD in 1999. Since 2003 he has been represented by Groveland Gallery. In 2005, Lyon was chosen to be an Artist In Residence in Badlands National Park, SD. There he experienced both a dramatic landscape in terms of light and scale and a subtle one in terms of color and gradations. The work generated there culminated in exhibitions in 2007 and 2009 in Minneapolis. Most recently, Lyon was awarded a 2009 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board for continued work on his paintings of snow in the city where he sees the ambiguities of "Nature" in the urban environment.

'Partly by default, partly by design, all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated- of coming, or finding itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization. Indeed, even the wild depends on civilization for its survival."

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire