About Charles
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.
In 2009 Lyon was awarded an 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.
In 2012 Lyon was invited to stay on a ranch in the North Dakota Badlands to paint the Little Missouri River Landscape. He has exhibited twice at Dickinson State University work from both North and South Dakota. Concurrently, he has been working on paintings and watercolors of local flowers. Roses, dahlias and peonies have been his subjects with specific focus on the color effects of opacity, transparency and translucence.
In the fall of 2013, Lyon visit Rome again to look and study. A late afternoon visit to Ponte St. Angelo and the ten angels there designed by Bernini left him deeply moved. In the winter of 2015, he exhibited paintings and watercolors based on his experience that afternoon as well as other images from Rome.
Most recently Lyon has been painting the northern regions of Minnesota known as the Boundary Waters. He has made several trips into the area canoeing and portaging.