04 Sep Artist Spotlights: Linda Infante Lyons

Linda Infante Lyons celebrates her homeland and Native Alaskan heritage through landscapes that may bring to mind Magic Realism, a meticulously detailed yet dreamlike spiritual style also favored by artists as diverse as Rockwell Kent, Frida Kahlo, Grant Wood, and — a particular favorite of hers — Lawren Harris, a founder of Canada’s early-20th-century Group of Seven painters. “Something about his use of light and essential, basic shapes,” she says, “creates a monumental, reverential altar to nature.”

In her own works, like the recent Critter’s Creek, Infante Lyons achieves a similarly soul-stirring impact. The painting was inspired by trails she hikes with her husband, British artist Graham Dane, and their dogs, adjoining the Anchorage campus of the University of Alaska, where Dane also teaches. “I especially like winter scenes, where you’re seeing the bare bones of the trees,” she says. She takes photos with her phone to help focus her mind on “the elements I can use in a painting, the weather, the light, the way the trees lean, reflections in the water.” But then, in her studio, “I go straight to the canvas, allowing myself to see things in the painting that weren’t in the photograph, trusting my intuition to balance color, light, and shapes, creating a harmony.”

Critter’s Creek | Oil on Canvas | 30 x 40 inches

The search for visual harmony has driven her since early childhood. Born in Anchorage, she showed an early passion for art. “Through grade school, my teachers would complain that I was always drawing in my notebook.” Not that she didn’t also demonstrate academic talent. While continuing to make art in her spare time, Infante Lyons earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and went on to work three years as a lab technician in cancer research. “But I came to realize that my interest in science was more about its spiritual, creative, artistic nature.”

In 1982, she moved to Chile, where she lived for 18 years. At first, she focused on raising her three daughters. Then, once they’d all started school, in the mid-1990s she enrolled in the studio arts program at Viña del Mar Escuela de Bellas Artes. “I wanted to get started right away, studying painting and life drawing for about three years, exhibiting my work alongside friends and colleagues.”

Her return to Alaska in 2001 yielded fresh inspiration — and not just from the landscape. In 2016, she was invited to contribute to Decolonizing Alaska, a touring exhibition examining the state’s history through the lens of cultural identity. Her contribution became the first of a continuing series of “icon” portraits combining two strands of her heritage from her great-grandmother, an Alutiiq from Kodiak Island, and her great-grandfather, an Estonian-Russian farmer who settled there. So powerful are the results that a recent work — Taquka’aq, Sovereign of Kodiak Island — was recently acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. These paintings, she says, enable her “to create something visually new that expresses the spiritual cosmology I align with.”

Point Pushki | Oil on Canvas | 30 x 60 inches

See Linda Infante Lyons’ solo show The View From Here: Northern Landscapes at Stremmel Gallery, Reno, Nevada, through October 2. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, Alaska; the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska; the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, Alaska; the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska; the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio; and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.