The Art Portfolio of Ariel Lyons
Smooth as Silk, acrylic, oil, and collage
Ariel Lyons is an Ottawa-based artist and art educator who works specifically with GOLDEN brand acrylic paints. The artist’s portfolio encompasses works of portraiture, landscape painting, and abstraction, with varying degrees of detail and gestural mark-making.
I like the way that Ariel experiments with a wide variety of media in her portfolio. The artist’s style is changeable and seems tailored to the particular medium and substrate that Ariel chooses to use at a given time. The artist’s Pouring and Layers series takes on a totally abstract aesthetic, focusing on the materiality of the paint and the substrate. This sense of awareness of the texture and layering of paint comes into play elsewhere in Ariel’s portfolio, like in some of the artist’s portraits, where layers of colour and distinct brush marks form the basis of facial features and volumes.
The artist’s landscape and nature painting express a similar method of layering, with light beautifully rendered in visible, confident brush marks.