Susan Lyon isn’t sure where she’s going next — but she can hardly wait to get there. As a painter, travel inspires her work. “I get on a mission to see a town,” she says. “I love to capture things that you don’t see every day.” To that end, she’s visited, among other countries, Nepal, Peru, and the African nation of Namibia.

Wherever she goes, Lyon brings an infectious optimism and an eagerness to connect with people; it’s a formula that has resulted in colorful portraits with a range of faces as wide and wondrous as the globe itself. 
“I love the face,” Lyon explains, standing in her downtown Winston-Salem studio, each wall filled with framed portraits. “I’m attracted to the shadow, the shapes, and the graphic quality of the face.”
That graphic quality is elegantly executed in Lyon’s portrait called Kate, a conté pencil drawing that combines the real with the ethereal. The profile is luminous; light pours over the young woman, her gaze fixed, her stillness a study in poise. Wearing a decorative pleated white collar, her long hair pinned up in braids, Kate looks handsome and Victorian, suggesting old family photographs of your great-grandmother.

As Lyon draws, she aims for a look that is smooth and minimal. Using her fingers or a paper towel, Lyon presses and evens each line so they all but disappear. “The pastel pencil is super-soft and super-messy,” she says. This helps to create an “opaque shape and masses in the line.”

Shape drives Lyon’s portraits. As a student at Chicago’s Academy of Art in the early 1990s, Lyon learned what she calls a “new language” that changed her vision. “I began seeing shapes as faces. I didn’t think that an eye is an eye. I started just drawing it as shadow and learning the line on the paper. It was fascinating.” 
Initially, Lyon expected to go into commercial art, but her love of fine art upended that plan. From the beginning, she won many awards for her oil paintings. These days her work is shown nationally and represented in galleries in New Mexico, Charleston, and, locally at Germanton Gallery. In addition, she self-published a book, Visions and Voyages, which describes her artistic path and process.
Lyon carries over her realistic style when painting, but tosses away anything remotely monochromatic. She loves color — the more vibrant the better. Lyon’s use of color conveys her innate expression of what she calls “aesthetic whimsy.”
She long ago gave up worrying that her work wasn’t grittier. “I am interested in beauty,” she says. “I want to have fun.” With those two objectives in mind, she’s embraced her interest in painting dolls, animals, flowers, and children.
A small sampling of her paintings’ titles — Amusement, Contentment, Delight — speak to the emotional terrain she stakes out as an artist. Lyon’s mission seems to be to share the joy she finds in life. 
In her painting Amusement, Lyon vividly captures the innocent charm of a girl playing with dolls. The purples and pinks are lush and inviting, the homemade fabric dolls are strewn across the floor where the child sits safely surrounded by a world of timeless make-believe. The skillful rendering of the scene pulls you in as much as the beautiful girl who sits amused and alone in this setting.
“I just watched her having fun,” Lyon says about that modeling session with Nicole, a friend’s niece. “I like the way she’s looking away. It leads you off the painting and makes you wonder what she’s looking at.” 
“I have an optimistic, whimsical look at life,” Lyon continues, smiling. “In a way it’s safe, but I figure if I can look at it for a long time, maybe other people can too.”

For more information about the artist, go to http://www.susanlyon.com.

When did you realize you would live a creative life?
That was early. I wasn’t very bookish; I was creative and always a little melodramatic.

Where do you find your inspiration?
Definitely from people, travel, museums, and the Internet. Artists from 100 years ago also inspire me — from the 1880s to the 1920s — that whole renaissance.

What do you do to overcome a creative block?
My problems are more about burnout. Painting nonstop. You’re like a machine. Before big shows, I’m not very happy. And you do go through phases where nothing works, even the brush feels foreign, but I’m not too upset when things aren’t working out.

What do you think of failure?
I feel like I’m pretty lucky. I’m pretty Zen about the commerce side, and I realize how arbitrary art is. I would see failure in people who make excuses and then complain about it.

What quality do you most admire in other artists?
I most admire being different. Someone who changes the way you see work.

Which artists do you most admire?
Joaquin Sorolla, who is Spanish; Anders Zorn, Swedish; Cecilia Beaux, and so many more.

What would surprise people about you?
That I’m incredibly laid-back about art. I really don’t know how paint is made.