Karyn Lyons

With a fondness for the exciting and disturbing emotional currents that charge adolescence, Karyn Lyons’s paintings act as remembrances—goodbyes to those unbridled moments of girlhood. Smoldering and pining, Lyons weaves fantasy with the autobiographical to compose imaginative scenes of those complicated, not-yet-tamed between-times of exploration and discovery. A former art director in the fashion industry, the New York-based painter captures teen girls engaging with love and life. Her sense of composition depicts moments of intimacy juxtaposed against those complicated between-times of exploration, discovery, and resolution. Mysterious and romantic—these pictures are exorcisms of desire, of those luscious days when all you could do was sit by the phone and hope you didn’t miss the call.