Susan Lyman is a sculptor and painter who has lived year-round in Provincetown since 1981, when she was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. Ms. Lyman is also the recipient of visual arts grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Artists’ Foundation of Boston. She has taught at Massachusetts College of Art, Hamilton and Kirkland Colleges, and the University of Michigan School of Art. Ms. Lyman has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions for over 30 years in the United States, Japan, and New Zealand. Her work is held in museum and corporate collections including Champion International Paper Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, Arkansas Art Center and Museum, and Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Lyman's studio is a kinetic and engaged place, where drawing, painting, collage and sculpture are all in ongoing dialogue; separate but parallel activities. Lyman is fascinated with the “body“ visible in natural forms, and with the pre-camera world of botanical illustration. For several years now she has been painting “portraits“ of certain odd roots, flowers, and strange suggestive fruits and vegetables. Recently she has been painting on the “inside“ of solid wood fragments scavenged from beaches both here on the Cape and the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. She paints directly on cutaway surfaces of the wood, adding portraits of flowers, leaf galls, self portraits and other scarred or weathered fragments found in the wood. Sometimes the paintings mirror the wood itself, sometimes they reveal what the wood might hold inside.


I must confess to an obsession with trees. A twisted root or vine, a gnarled oak or sinuous beech embraces an emotion, as in longing, or mimics the sensuality, the imperfections, the frailties of the human body. British essayist John Fowles aptly described the woods in his delightful ramble, The Tree, “..there is certainly something erotic in them”. So I have been preoccupied with trees, and woods, ever since 1973 when I stumbled upon a stand of twisted but sensuously curved silver birch in Tierra del Fuego struggling in unison to grow upright against the adverse wind and weather conditions that prevail in that remote outpost.

The inspiration, subject, and process in my wood sculptures have been inseparable from the organic materials themselves and observation of the natural world from which they come. I find the wood as castoffs from local tree dumps or excavated from housing construction sites, or scavenged from weathered wash ashore detritus or beech fires long after the embers have died out (some of these charred logs had washed out to sea and back again). I interpret the gathered remnants from my stockpile into carved and constructed sculptures. A fallen sapling or twisted vine or root may just be the suggestive energetic “line” or shape I am looking for. I am focused on making the sculptures with the spontaneity of drawing, to work without a plan, make a cut, a “fold”, add another piece, paint, see where the work goes and stop when it is enough.

~SL 2008