Clive Tyler | The Power of Art

Clive Tyler delights in reconnecting the viewer with the natural world

By Gussie Fauntleroy

This story was featured in the March/April 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

MANY YEARS ago, Clive Tyler was gazing out the window at the mountains in northern Colorado when answering one simple question caused everything to click into place. After more than 20 successful years in graphic design, product design, art direction, and color and trend forecasting, he could clearly see that the era of hand-drawn commercial art was coming to a swift and unforgiving close. Computers were taking over, clients were spending less, deadlines were shorter, and the fun was disappearing from what had been highly creative and innovative work.

Nearing 40, Tyler found himself that day sitting with a life coach as he sorted through his choices at a time of necessary transition. The two men were talking about fear-based beliefs when the coach posed a question: “Is there anything you can do that you have absolutely no fear of?” Tyler’s answer was immediate: “Yeah, I can draw. Anything.” So at the coach’s suggestion, he signed up for art classes—his first since earning degrees in graphic design and illustration from Kent State University.

The first class he took was in pastels. As he continued working in the commercial field, at that point self-employed, Tyler decided to set a goal to start making a living from fine art within five years. Within just one year, though, his paintings were being exhibited, and he had earned Best of Show and First Place awards. Then came the deciding moment: a “bad design project where the printer screwed up and everything went wrong. I thought, ‘Okay, someone’s talking to me,’” he remembers, smiling. “‘I promise I won’t do any more design.’”

That was in 2005. Since then Tyler’s painting career has taken off, with gallery representation, invitational museum exhibitions, and work in the permanent collections of the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, GA, and the Brinton Museum in Big Horn, WY. Along with a growing collector base, these achievements have allowed him to continue exploring both the artistic medium and the subject matter that he loves.

TYLER HAS always thought of himself as an explorer and risk-taker. As a boy growing up in rural Ohio, he and his sister would roam through woods, glacial depressions, rock outcroppings, and an abandoned sand quarry that seemed ancient to them. His deep love of the natural world was taking root. At the same time, a seemingly innate talent for drawing was fostered in art classes every year beginning in elementary school. As part of a high-school vocational program, he studied commercial art with an instructor who taught fundamentals including perspective and—significantly for Tyler—had the students paint their own color wheel and gray scale.

Discouraged by well-meaning adults from pursuing fine art in college, he focused on graphic design but also signed up for every life-drawing and painting course he could at Kent State, taking some of them multiple times. Following graduation he began his commercial-art career with a firm near Cleveland that designed and imported stationery products from Asia. Six months into the job he was sent to Japan to meet with manufacturers, and within the first year he’d become the firm’s creative director.

From age 22 to 30 Tyler traveled frequently for work, much of it in the product design field. In Milan, Frankfurt, Paris, and other European cities he visited art museums and historic churches in his free time, storing up a familiarity with and appreciation for some of the world’s greatest artworks. He also watched with fascination as popular product colors hopscotched around the globe. “I’d see a trend or color palette from California picked up in Japan,” he says. “Then it would go to Italy, which seemed to copy Japan a lot except with warmer colors. Then Germany would copy it, but in cooler colors again. It kept morphing—it was very interesting to watch color do that.”

A self-described “color geek,” Tyler huddled with others of his kind at forecasting summits, where trends like the Pantone color of the year are selected. He stretched his creative muscles with every job, earning several patents for design ideas. When meeting with clients, he always carried a drawing pad. “I’d listen to the clients and draw concepts right in front of them, a logo or camera bag or whatever their product was. I’d ask: Is this what you have in mind?” he says. “So when I started in fine art, I realized I could draw very well. My hand and eye were right there.”

At 30 Tyler went out on his own with graphic design, and at 40 he purchased his dream property near Fort Collins, CO, an old dairy farm with a creek, mature trees, horses, and an outbuilding that became his studio. By then he was taking art classes on the side and spending any free time he had in the nearby mountains—camping, skiing, mountain biking, rafting, hiking, horseback riding, taking pack trips, and painting. He was immersing himself in the land that became his primary subject, and teaching himself to paint en plein air.

A few years later, ready for a change again, Tyler settled in Taos. From there he is able to quickly reach high country in the southernmost Rockies. A short drive in the other direction takes him to dryer terrain: mesas, sagebrush, arroyos, and the spectacular Rio Grande Gorge. “I have two different worlds right here,” he says. His home and studio sit on a tranquil, verdant parcel of former farmland in Taos, from which he can hear distant church bells and watch grazing cows.

Tyler converted a workshop on the property into a studio—but not in the earth tones and rustic wood of traditional Southwest style. “With wood floors, everything [I painted] would go orange and glow,” he says, keenly aware of the influence of colors on each other. Instead he installed a gray floor and painted the walls a neutral grayish-white with a hint of red “to counter the green from outside.” The result is a chromatically neutral space where the colors he applies in pastel are exactly those he intends for conveying a scene’s true feeling, even when they are not an exact replica of what the eye expects to see. As he tells his painting students: “Don’t duplicate; create!”

TYLER DISCOVERED the effectiveness of that approach after the 2008 economic downturn, when gallery sales sagged and he turned to painting for fundraising art events in South Carolina and Georgia. Exploring the Southern coastal landscape, he was struck one evening by the sunset glow on live oaks draped with Spanish moss. He noticed that other painters rendered these magnificent trees primarily in browns, grays, and dark greens. “I saw that the moss was more orange on one side and purple on the other,” he remembers. “I thought, you know, I can paint these trees totally different from other artists.”

These days Tyler travels to paint on location in the South and around Colorado, New Mexico, and the Mountain West, as well as the Texas Hill Country, whose pastoral scenes appeal to his sense of quiet beauty. He loads a French easel and pastels into the back of his pickup truck and sits on the tailgate to sketch and paint. These small plein-air pieces are not to sell, but serve as starting points for larger studio works. They allow him to paint in series, exploring variations of composition and color from the same locations. Often the paintings increase in scale, up to 34 by 36 inches—quite large for pastels. The biggest one in a series is the “finale, like a ta-da!” he says.

One recent series includes ALPINE WINTER CREEK and was inspired by a deep, early fall snow in Yellowstone. On a sunny day, the bright snow contrasted with yellow-gold and green aspens as buffalo ambled through. “I made small studies and later worked up in size. I couldn’t get enough of it,” Tyler says. Another winter series began closer to home. High in the mountains next to Taos, he came across a valley filled with towering fir and aspen. The evening sun shone like a spotlight beneath the lower edge of a cloud layer in the west, illuminating the scene with a radiance that took the artist’s breath away. FOREST LIGHT is among the series begun with pastel sketches that day. Like most of his work, it is a relatively intimate scene that one could imagine wandering right into.

Images like these have prompted collectors to reminisce to Tyler about memorable childhood moments, like standing beside a grandfather next to a forest stream, learning to fish. “When I was doing all those shows in the South, I would ask people what attracted them to a painting,” he says. “I realized paintings have stories. It might be my story in the beginning, but when it’s done, it’s someone else’s story.” In one case, a collector who’d moved from Chicago to Colorado and was purchasing one of Tyler’s mountain paintings had tears in her eyes as she explained what drew her to the piece: It represented exactly why she and her husband had made the move. “That’s when I discovered there is a purpose for art,” Tyler says. “To help people connect back to nature, or connect to an emotional memory they forgot about. That’s the power of art.”

representation
InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX; Oh Be Joyful Gallery, Crested Butte, CO; Horton Hayes Gallery, Charleston, SC; Saks Galleries, Denver, CO; www.clivetyler.com.

This story was featured in the March/April 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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