Mark Stone profiles Brooklyn painter Giles Lyon.

Stone writes: "I connected immediately with the paintings. Giles was working in an AbEx style but doing it very self consciously. He was changing the intent of the historical style to make over 'action painting' into a thoughtful reexamination of the act of painting. It was an abstraction of processes. After laying down the drip, the slash or the stroke he would delineate the graphic nature of the result. It was a way to reclaim the pictorial, to push the edges of the lost abstract 'figure' against the ground. This process was done without irony using history directly to express something personal instead of merely commenting on the past. Giles found a way to manipulate an academic style, to make it his own, to create a language of abstract poetic forms from within the meme."