Real achievement

Dunedin artist Peter Lyons has found critical and commercial success in the US after being “discovered” while working as a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Lyons’ strikingly rendered rural and urban landscapes have seen him compared to realist masters Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Caspar David Friedrich in the American art press. The 46-year-old self-taught artist had seldom exhibited his paintings prior to 2001; his works now hang in such esteemed galleries as Boston’s St Botolph Club and the Richard York Gallery in New York, where they sell for tens of thousands of dollars. “If you’ve really got this thing and the passion for it, just get out there, the hell with it,” he said in an interview with Wellington’s Dominion Post. “What I did – you don’t need money to do it, you need that passion.” Lyons’ next show is in two months time at the Meredith Ward Fine Arts gallery in New York.