Sarah

Sarah is one of several portraits Lyon has made of this particular sitter, treating her in the Japanese tradition of the bijin-ga — the print of a beautiful figure — but in a contemporary American idiom. Working from his own photographs, Lyon resolves the image into discrete tonal layers, cuts each as a separate cherry block on a CNC router, and prints them in registration on sheets of kozo washi using a baren and water-based pigments. The result reads at a distance as a continuous-tone photograph and, on approach, dissolves into stacked impressions whose grain and slight misregistration are visible to the eye. Sarah, like other portraits in this body of work, is typically printed at a scale unattainable in the Edo workshop, making the close attention to skin, hair, and the boundary of the figure against the unprinted ground unusually charged. Within Lyon's output the Sarah portraits form a sustained series that documents both the sitter and the artist's evolving technical procedures from the early 2000s onward.