Nature is an inescapable constant for everyone who lives in the circumpolar Arctic and sub-Arctic, be they the Aleut and Inuit of Alaska, northern Canada, and Greenland, or Euro-Scandinavians, Siberians, and North Americans. To be an artist in the northern latitudes is to share the spirits of Earth and its peoples, its landscapes and creatures. Nature binds all those elements tightly together in great cycles that extend from the seasonal to the millennial. Artists are born to pay closer attention than most of us.

Linda Infante Lyons (b. 1959) is an Alaska Native woman whose ancestors from Kodiak Island were both Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and Russian/Estonian (Estonia being the northeasternmost of the three Baltic states). Her heritage as a northerner is profound, and nature shines through her paintings. Lyons first earned a degree in biology from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and then trained as an artist in Valparaiso, Chile, where she lived for eighteen years. She moved back to Anchorage in the 1990s and opened her studio. Mountains, glaciers, icebergs, lakes, and rivers on canvas ensued. The landscapes were deserted, still, meditative, yet mysterious.

Lyons was influenced at the beginning of her career by the paintings of Lawren Harris, a founder in 1920 of Canada’s legendary Group of Seven artists. The works of Harris and Lyons are also clearly influenced by Rockwell Kent, known for his flat, graphic depiction of dramatic Arctic landscapes. Both Harris and Kent had been enthralled with the paintings of Scandinavian landscape painters that they had seen in a 1913 exhibition, early modernists promoting the identity of their countries as distinct from southern Europe. Harris was also influenced by friends Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and other painters who shaped landscapes into graphic emblems of place.

Lyons had already established her signature landscape style when she participated in the statewide Decolonizing Alaska project and its opening exhibition in 2016. This led her to explore a more personal and embodied identity through portraits. Drawing upon her Estonian roots, she painted Native Alaskan women with halos around their heads, figures often holding Alaskan animals and surrounded by native flora. She merged the iconography of the Russian Orthodox Church with Alaskan flora and fauna, her powerful landscapes forming the backgrounds.

Linda Infante Lyons is now counted among the most important artists of the North precisely because she establishes equality among peoples, nature, culture, and spirit. It doesn’t hurt that the paintings are inevitably beautiful.

(Text by Bill Fox)