Tarra Lyons

interview with Kathleen King

October 26, 2008

Kathleen King: How long have you been painting?

Tarra Lyons: Since I was a little kid. The first time I painted, I painted with fireflies.

KK: Really! How’d you do that?

TL: I gathered them up in a jar and I smeared them. That’s my first memory of painting, when I was around 6 or 7 years old, and I remember it being really cool because in the dark the painting was day-glo. After a while it would fade.

Very inventive. Did you always want to be an artist?

I grew up in the Bronx, in a pretty poor area.  My salvation was the library where I spent a lot of my time pouring over books on painting; Leonardo da Vinci was a favorite. I always wanted to be an artist. Never anything else.

My dad died a couple years ago, and my uncle was going through the stuff in the house. He dug up a bunch of paintings I did when I was a kid. What’s interesting is that I used the same imagery then as now—trees, birds, animals. A one-track mind, I guess. (Laughs)

Your paintings are narrative with fairy tale qualities, stories and scenes.

A lot of it is not conscious. When I paint I feel almost like it’s not me that’s painting. I just follow an inner guide. As far as progression, it all feels like the same painting; a continuation from the last painting. It’s like I run out of canvas, so I need to get another. If you could scroll it, that would be like how it goes from one to the next. (Laughs)

I looked at some work I did in college where I used the sailors’ knot. The theme has come around full circle as well. I am using knots in recent work, too.

Knots are fascinating.  I saw that you had a group of works with necklaces as well.

The necklace series was about something else. I had inherited a lot of stuff from significant people in my life when they died. I was interested in the symbolism of the necklaces and what they meant after the person was gone. Even objects without great value, like a bowl, you might remember and associate with someone. Maybe an experience you had with them, say shelling peas, or whatever. But how you connect to them through the object; everytime you use the bowl you think about the person. Objects and their preciousness, I guess.

You seem to be interested in intimacy and your paintings have that quality. Your work is narrative but not in a specific way; it is suggestive.

My work is very personal. I know what my story is, and the paintings come out of that. Anyone who views them will bring their own life experience to the work, whether they know any specifics of my story. It’s fine with me if they read a painting in a different light that I painted it.

You grew up in the Bronx and you went to school in Boston. How’d you get from the Bronx to Boston?

I fled (Laughs). I wasn’t mean enough to stay in New York so I got kicked out. They revoked my New York City card! I did my undergraduate degree at Boston University. After I graduated I stayed there for about eight years. Then, I took one more stab at New York City, because I was convinced that an artist had to make it there. I moved back, but I was completely miserable. I left for good and went off to the West Coast for grad school.

I came out to California College of the Arts because I wanted to blow glass. They had a great glass program. I wanted to continue with painting as well. CCA was the only school where I could do such a broad and flexible program.

At BU, the program was very traditional. The professors wore white coats! (Laughs) And they taught as though it was still the Renaissance. Their way of drawing the model was that if a body part was a quarter of an inch off, you’d have to re-draw it. The drawing classes were 9 hours a week.

That’s a good basis for an artist, really. Traditional training really grounds you.

I agree with that. Now that I’m a teacher, at Diablo Valley College, I teach that way, too. When I went from BU to CCA I had a bit of a hard time because CCA taught things the other way around, encouraging expression rather than skills. I did some really bad work there…which was good…

(Laughs) You find out what you don’t want to do. You find your way. In the end, your work proceeds from your training. You are a strong draftsperson, and yet quite expressive as well.

Thanks. I try to get away from the really tightly rendered stuff as much as I can. But I don’t like things super-loose where you can’t even tell what you’re looking at. It’s like a struggle I always have with my work. For me the image grounds the work.

Also, the symbolism means something to me, deep in my heart, so if it’s not something I can believe in and relate to, then there’s no point to the painting. I can’t just work with the formal elements. I have to be in touch with the meaning.

You have some paintings that have elements on the edge of the recognizable, as florals for example. But then you have those calligraphic flourishes, abstract marks, and some atmospheric, softer passages. You bring an interest in abstraction to your work, don’t you?

I do. I’m fascinated with things that you can see out of the corner of your eye, when you’re not looking fully at something. Like when you’re walking in a field looking at the flowers and you suddenly realize there are all these seed pods floating around in the air. I’m interested in the stuff that people don’t see.

To me everything is part of everything else, like the ratios you see in the Fibonacci sequence, the swirls in a nautilus shell being related to the whole swirl of the universe. Those amazing and wonderful connections and patterns are so important to me.

I liked the series you did of clouds. Do you work outside in nature or from nature?

I don’t, actually. I’ve never gone outside and painted a landscape. I’m more interested in nature as symbol. Those paintings of clouds were done from photographs. I started those after 9/11, when I didn’t want any kind of imagery at all. I wanted to work with atmosphere as a calming influence. As I painted the clouds, I felt like I had the chance to enter into them and be inside them. With all my work, I get a chance to be in a fantastical world for a while.  It’s a place for meditation and reflection.  

Do you feel your work is literature oriented? You said you loved the library even as a kid. Do you read and does that inform your work?

I read quite a bit. I always wanted to be a children’s book illustrator, too. I have done some work around it in the past, and now that I have kids, I think I will tackle it again. It’s on my to-do list.

What books do you read, and what do you read to your kids?

I’m so particular about what I read to the kids. I search around for the best stuff.  Of course, it has to have really good art! We love Maurice Sendak and the Madeline books. There are some really beautiful books now. The Mazie books are great.

My kids and I always enjoyed Beatrix Potter, the stories and the illustrations are so affecting. I was thinking of her as I looked through your portfolios. The way you anthropomorphize animals, and as you’ve told me, your animals are really stand-ins for humans and their behaviors.  Tell me more about your technique. Your oil painting technique is very rich; you use a lot of beautiful color. How have you developed that over time?

My technique is very classical; layering thin washes, glazing. When I was pregnant I didn’t want to paint with oils because of the spirits, so I took up acrylic. But it was so difficult. It dries so fast and I couldn’t do the layers. I’ve figured out some ways to work with layers in acrylic but it’s just not the same. I’ve gone back to oil painting now, so I’m happier with that again! For this show I have a couple of encaustic pieces as well.

Can you give us a preview of the work in the upcoming show?

Right now I’m almost finished with a big painting called Butterflies in my Stomach. I may change the title but it’s a painting of a stomach with butterflies and knots. That is a large painting for me at about four by five feet. I’ve been showing smaller work at the monthly back room shows at Mercury 20, and saving some larger work for this show.  I think I’ve been working on this show for about nine months.

One fascinating thing about the small work that we’ve been seeing monthly at the gallery is the fine, delicate brushes and strokes that you use. When you paint larger do you use bigger brushes?

I still use the small brushes. So, the paintings take longer as they get bigger (Laughs). I start with large brushes and work from general to specific. I keep putting in more and more small detail until my husband comes in and says, don’t you think you have enough stuff in there?  I think, OK maybe you are right. It’s become a tangled mess of things. Here’s what happens: I break it down, omit some stuff, get upset with it, work with it. Suddenly, there’s much less stuff. Then I start building up my tiny brush strokes again.

I’ve done another big one called See-Saw. It’s a tiger and a deer on a see-saw having a conversation. They have bubbles over their heads, talking. There’s lots of teeny-tiny brushwork.

I’ve got those two big pieces, plus another that I might include. It’s of a deer talking. I found some letters from the 1800s with beautiful calligraphic cursive writing. I collaged the letters onto that piece and painted over them.  I’m not sure if that piece will make the show.  

I also have an oil-on-linen piece that’s a kind of a self- portrait with my son riding on my back through a landscape of cherries. He’s got the head of a bird on his own little body.

You have a couple of paintings with piggy-back characters. I bet you’re really getting into the piggy-back rides now? (Laughs)

I’m immersed in a playground world now that my twins are 21 months old. I live in kid-land and it’s seeping into all my work.

I may show a diptych that is almost photorealistic in style. I decided that every year I am going to try to do portraits of my kids. I plan to portray them as different kinds of creatures every year, depending on what they’re like (laughs) and my relationship with them. Last year they were finches. I did portraits of their faces on finch bodies.

Your work is very accurate and shows your knowledge of bird species. You did that one marvelous painting with all the birds—what was it fifty-something birds? Do you ever go birding?

Fifty-Seven Birds. Oh yeah, I used to love to go birding when I had the time. Quite a bit, and I have taken some classes. For about a year after the death of my first son, I spent a lot of time birding. I needed to go to places that would calm me. We went out to the parks: Briones, Tilden.  I remember one day getting up at the crack of dawn to go birding and we went out into the cold and fog. I was totally freezing my ass off and we saw only two or three birds. But the strange thing is that when I got home I saw twelve or fourteen birds in my own backyard. (Laughs)

Birds are elusive and the sightings can be rare and magical. The first and only time I went birding was out to Point Reyes with a guy who was an obsessive, competitive birder. It felt like we were hunting these birds with our binoculars: waiting, observing, identifying the different species, checking them off his list. It’s actually pretty exciting but also, you are simply out in a vast landscape watching wild birds moving across the skies. It’s calming and exhilarating at the same time.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the show which will run through the month of November at Mercury 20.

I’m really thrilled to be showing with Anna Vaughan. I was so glad when we decided to show together. We deal with many similar themes and our work really talks to each other. There’s synchronicity there.

We are also doing an installation together. Back when I was birding, I had an Audubon calendar with a bird for every day of the year. I was trying to keep my hands and mind busy during a very difficult time in my life, so I found myself cutting each and every bird out, all three hundred and sixty five of them. There was a grid on the back and even when you turned them over you could almost tell what kind of bird it was from the silhouette. The silhouette and the grid spoke to me about the marginalization of nature. But I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I was drawn to the vacant image. I kept them over the years and would install them in my studio wherever it was. When Anna and I started brainstorming about doing an installation in the window she wanted to work on the floor with a mound shape in plaster, and I thought of my bird cut outs  hung over it. We’re working along those lines. I can’t wait to hang the show and see how it all comes together.