LONDON, UK. September 1, 2025 – Felix & Spear, is pleased to announce John Lyons: The Language of Painting, an exhibition dedicated to the work of the distinguished painter and poet John Lyons (b. 1933).
Born in Trinidad and resident in the United Kingdom since the 1950s, Lyons has developed a career that spans both visual and literary disciplines. His paintings, often informed by the traditions of Caribbean folklore and mythology, reflect a lifelong engagement with narrative, memory, and imagination. As both poet and painter, Lyons brings a distinctive perspective to his practice, creating works in which image and language converge.
The works selected for the exhibition are from across Lyons’ career, highlighting the breadth of his artistic achievement. Characterised by bold colour, symbolic form, and a lyrical sensibility, his canvases articulate a poetic understanding of the visual arts.
Each work demonstrates his ability to translate the cadences of verse into painterly expression, offering audiences an insight into the imaginative world that has shaped his practice over more than six decades.
Lyons’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in public and private collections. John Lyons: The Language of Painting provides an opportunity to engage with the vision of an artist whose contribution to British and Caribbean cultural life is significant, and whose art continues to resonate with clarity and invention.
The exhibition will be on view at Felix & Spear from 11 September to 2 November 2025.
About John Lyons
John Lyons (b. 1933, Port of Spain, Trinidad), lives and works in Cambridgeshire, England. Lyons moved to England in 1959 to study at Goldsmiths College, later earning an Art Teachers’ Diploma from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Over a 27-year teaching career, he maintained a prolific artistic and literary practice, exhibiting widely and publishing seven poetry collections. His work has featured in major exhibitions including Life Between Islands: British Caribbean Art 1950s- Now (Tate Britain, 2021–22) and No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action (Guildhall Gallery, 2016). Solo exhibitions include Carnivalesque (2024-25, The Whitworth and The Box), Mythopoeia (1997) and Behind the Carnival (1992–94). Lyons has served on national arts panels, adjudicated major awards, and co-founded the Hourglass Studio Gallery and HEADS to promote community arts. In 2003 he received the Windrush Arts Achievement Award. His children’s poetry collection Dancing in the Rain was shortlisted for the 2016 CLiPPA Award and in 2025 won the Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors.
ENDS