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closeMost parents steer their children toward a lucrative career. Judy Lyon had her sights set on becoming a veterinarian, but since it wasn’t a popular vocation for women in her day, her folks nixed that idea.
“My parents suggested I study art, because they knew how much I loved it.”
She took their advice. It’s the reverse of what most of her artist friends experienced, Lyon said.
“I guess I was pretty lucky that way,” she said.
The featured artist this month at the Gallery at the Old Schoolhouse will exhibit watercolors of a few favorite things. In addition to scenics, Lyon renders photorealistic impressions of flowers and wildlife.
Working outdoors
She paints about two-thirds of her work outdoors, with the Wednesday Irregulars or at the Piedras Blancas Lighthouse, where she leads local artists every month. The remainder of her watercolors are done at her Cambria home, working from sketches or still-life arrangements, photos, scenes inside her house or immediately outside, such as a visiting hawk.
Lyon expects to take a breather this summer. Last year at this time she had 50 paintings showing in four countywide shows simultaneously.
She recalls telling her husband, “Boy, when all those come back home, there’s not going to be room for us to live in our house.”
The couple lives in a five-level, three-story pole-house in a Monterey pine forest. “I call it our tree house,” Lyon said.
She doesn’t seek many other pleasures or activities. Being treasurer of the Central Coast Watercolor Society and first vice president of the National Watercolor Society takes up some of her time, along with jurying art shows
occasionally.
But she’s happy to stay put.
“I like being home,” Lyon said. “That’s probably my biggest enjoyment.”
And painting occasionally from the top-floor adds to that contentment. “I like to have the doors open to listen to the birds,” she said.
Life in the pines
The Allied Art’s Association’s featured artist, who moved to the Central Coast in 1976, has lived in Cambria since 1981, selecting the coastal town as “the jewel” of the Central Coast, she said. It’s a far cry from Kansas, where she spent her first 21 years. Lyon sublimates her former desire to be a vet by volunteering with the Homeless Animal Rescue Team.
A lifelong learner
To hone her artistic skills, she pores over art books from the library. “I feel that the more you look at, the more you learn,” Lyon said.
Now and then, the artist will take a workshop, recalling a three-week course in Oxford, England, and with Robert Bateman, one of the world’s most-celebrated contemporary wildlife artists, in Jackson Hole, Wy.
But Lyon believes that when it comes to workshops and classes, the fewer the better.
“It becomes confusing if you take too many,” she said. “I just feel that what I need to do is paint. I think, as with anything else, you just need to do it. As your style evolves, you get better.”
She does value attending a Cambria workshop led by Milford Zornes, a leader in the California style watercolor movement who died Feb. 24 at age 100.
“He was teaching right up till the end,” Lyon said, expressing admiration for artists who remain creatively active in old age. “I like to think that art keeps them young, keeps them going.”
Reach freelance writer Lee Sutter at
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