Wild Man Sandpoint Artist Stephen Lyman Finds Fame Painting Scenes Of What He Loves Best: The Wilderness

Back in 1979, when Stephen Lyman graduated top of his class from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, his classmates asked if he was going to stay in L.A. or head off to that other commercial art mecca, New York.

“I really baffled them,” recalls Lyman with a grin. “I said, ‘I think I’m going to move back to Idaho for a while.’ “

Good career move.

Today, Lyman is one of America’s best-known nature artists. The March 1996 issue of U.S. Art magazine listed him at No. 4 in its annual list of the most popular limited-edition print artists in the country. His lavish coffee-table book, “Into the Wilderness: An Artist’s Journey” (Artisan, 180 pages, $40), has sold out its 50,000-copy first printing after only a few months on the market. His original paintings sell for as much as the “mid-five-figures,” according to Rob Pitzer of the Bighorn Gallery in Carmel, Calif.

And Lyman has forged most of this career from his studio on the banks of Rapid Lightning Creek, 20 dirt miles north of Sandpoint.

Rapid Lightning Creek turned out to be the perfect art center for Lyman, a Lewiston native, who rejected commercial art and advertising to become what he calls a “wilderness artist.” This label encompasses all of his subjects, which he defines as “wildlife, landscape, light in the wilderness and campfires.”

The soft glow of the campfire has become Lyman’s signature image. In the 1980s, Lyman had already established a modest national reputation as a painter of birds, mountain goats, elk and other mountain wildlife. But then in 1989, he painted a scene called “Mountain Campfire.” It was his first painting without wildlife, and his first with a campfire.

“I was really excited about it, because I had always loved painting landscapes as much as wildlife, and there were so many wildlife artists jumping on the bandwagon,” he said. “I wanted to do something to distinguish myself, make myself more unique, and challenge myself with something that’s never been done before. And I really felt good about how I pulled it off.”

The print run sold out faster than any other painting he had ever done, and sparked a demand for more campfire scenes. Since then, he has done at least one campfire painting a year.

He said that a print of “Mountain Campfire” was originally priced at $195. Now, they are on the resale market for $4,000. Since then, other artists have climbed on the campfire bandwagon.

“I started a whole new category of art is what I did,” said Lyman.

Lyman is not surprised that campfires have such popular appeal.

“Everybody has good campfire memories, and they are always sitting around staring into the flames,” said Lyman. “I thought, what a great thing to try to paint….The experience I want people to have is that they are sitting in front of a campfire. People have told me, ‘Ahh, I can feel the warmth coming from it.”’

A campfire, as in any source of light, presents some particular technical problems. For one thing, it’s impossible to shoot a photograph that can capture the range of light from bright to dark as the human eye sees it. Yet that’s exactly what Lyman seeks to capture in his paintings.

“I do use photographs, which are helpful for certain things - for instance, the various shapes that flames can take in a split second,” said Lyman.

“Yet if you take a picture of a campfire, and then do a painting of it, it looks like the most goofy thing you’ve ever seen, with flames that are the weirdest shapes. Most people would say, that’s not what a campfire looks like.”

People may know Lyman as “that campfire guy,” but he still does only one campfire painting per year, as opposed to four or five wildlife and landscape paintings per year.

He had two works in U.S. Art’s list of the 25 most popular prints in 1995: one a campfire scene, “Evening Star,” the other a scene of a tree being struck by lightning, “Thunderbolt.”

His inspiration comes from everything he sees in the mountains. All he has to do is look out his window.

“Right through the yard, we’ve had bears, moose, coyotes, skunks, raccoons,” said Lyman.

Other times, all he has to do is trek through the nearby Selkirk Crest or tramp the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. Two of the paintings in his book, “Last Light of Winter” and “North Country Shores,” are wintertime studies of Lake Pend Oreille.

Yet his primary source of inspiration is 1,000 miles south as the red-tailed hawk flies.

“Probably half of my paintings are inspired from the Yosemite region,” said Lyman, who discovered the area as a student in California. “It’s hard to figure out. I’m just attracted to that place; I’m connected to that spot.”

He has made 40 trips to Yosemite to date. Soon it will be 41.

“I’m going back next month (April) for a couple of weeks, and I know I will see things that will give me 25 ideas for more things to do,” he said. “And the next time I go backpacking, I’ll find 25 more ideas.”

Lyman comes by his love of the mountains naturally.

He grew up in Lewiston and has been backpacking since his high school days. He has also been drawing since his high school days; he was “always the class artist.”

He was accepted into the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and trained to become a commercial artist. By the time he graduated, he had discovered that he didn’t want to be a commercial artist. He still wanted to be an artist, just not the kind who hires out for advertising, CD covers, graphic design and other commercial work.

And he also discovered he wasn’t cut out for the big city.

“I don’t like urban man-made environments,” said Lyman. “I can deal with ‘em for a while, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live there.”

So upon graduation he returned to Lewiston and searched for a way to make a living with his art. About 1980, he discovered a promising idea: the limited edition print.

A publishing company takes a painting, makes a series of high-quality full-size prints, and sells a few hundred or a few thousand. It was a relatively new idea at the time.

“People were still getting used to spending $100 for a piece of paper, as opposed to buying a poster,” said Lyman.

By 1982 he had accumulated a portfolio good enough to send off to The Greenwich Workshop, an established art printing house in Connecticut. The firm accepted him into its stable. He was only 24, “a young whippersnapper” in his own words.

Meanwhile, he had moved with his wife, Andrea, to Sheridan, Ore., where she had a music teaching job. They later moved to McMinnville, Ore., but in 1987 they began looking around for a place to settle permanently.

“Through the mail, the phone and the Federal Express truck, I could be wherever I wanted,” said Lyman.

They settled on Sandpoint.

“There were less people, more animals, fresher air, cleaner water,” said Lyman. “Plus, real estate was about half the cost of Oregon.”

They bought their house, converted the attic into a studio, and raised their two boys, Muir, 10, and Jarre, 8. They also started their own gallery, The Lyman Gallery, in downtown Sandpoint.

Now, they’re building a big new dream house near Lake Pend Oreille. Obviously, the limited-edition print market has been good to him.

“But for every person like myself who has been successful at it, there are thousands of others out there who haven’t been able to reach that level of success,” said Lyman.

Three things are required for success: talent, good marketing (handled by Greenwich in his case) and, finally, a subject matter that people like.

“There are really good artists out there who have connected to really good publishers, but they don’t sell very well because their subject matter isn’t something the general public likes very much,” he said.

It’s no coincidence that many of the top artists in the limited-edition print market have commercial art training, Lyman said.

“It’s very important for a commercial artist to communicate with the viewer, and that skill can translate to gallery paintings, too,” he said. “In my paintings, what I’m trying to communicate is drama, excitement and luminosity.”

The general public, of course, very much likes realism. While Lyman incorporates elements of abstract design into his compositions, it is essentially realistic art of an almost photographic quality.

Most people imagine realistic art to be a slow laborious process, but Lyman said he averages about 2-1/2 weeks per painting, with another 2-1/2 weeks in research and preparation.

“Painstaking? Not for me. It’s a skill you have to develop,” he said. “It looks like there’s a lot more detail than there really is. It’s part of the illusion, part of my style, that I know how to do this, this (demonstrating a brush stroke) and make it look like a jillion animal hairs, or grasses.”

What Lyman most admires in other artists - Robert Batemen, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran - is “a way of painting that makes the landscape look alive instead of cold and frozen.”

“I try to do that in my paintings, too,” he said.

He often works from his own photographs. As he works, he likes to have music playing, something soothing such as Enya or Mannheim Steamroller. He also likes vocal jazz; he and his wife sing in a vocal jazz group for fun.

Pitzer predicts that Lyman will soon come into his own not just for his limited edition prints but for his original paintings.

“You’ll start seeing a lot more of him in original art circles,” said Pitzer, who plans a major Lyman show in October at his Carmel gallery.

Although some segments of the art world look down on the limited-edition print market, Lyman loves it because it is democratic; “lots and lots of people can enjoy it.” The average price of one of his prints is $200 or $225, unframed, which is a tenth, or even a hundredth of the price of the original.

Even more democratic is the book, which came out in October.

“It gives me a lot of satisfaction to share my book with so many more people for $40, as opposed to $400,” said Lyman.

And it also makes his work readily accessible in places like New York and Los Angeles.

Remember those places? Those are national art centers, along with Rapid Lightning Creek.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 5 Photos (4 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: A SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO STEPHEN LYMAN: 1957 - 1996 The body of Sandpoint artist Stephen Lyman, 38, was found in Yosemite National Park in California on April 20 after a hiking accident three days earlier. The profile below first appeared April 14 on the IN Life cover. We are reprinting it here today due to many requests from readers for copies of the article.