About Tynley Bean



STACCATO Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 33" $225

STACCATO Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 33" $225

I came late to the world of art. After a friend criticized my doodles in 7th grade I swore off art altogether until college (for my associate’s degree) when I started drawing again. When I worked at a videogame company a few years later I became friends with many of the artists that worked there with me. I watched them work and asked a lot of questions about how they did their jobs. They encouraged me to pursue my interest in art, so when the opportunity came to go back to school for my bachelor’s degree, I decided to go for it and majored in Art Education at Brigham Young University - Idaho.







SEMAPHORE Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 28" $200

SEMAPHORE Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 28" $200

I spent much of my time in college in 3D studies, ceramics being one of my very favorite things to do. As an Art Ed major I got to dabble in a lot of different media and techniques. For a school project I decided to try my hand at a Jackson Pollock style painting. I knew his paintings were famous for being enormous so I started out with a 5 foot by 9 foot canvas, did a “used house paint’ drive, and went to work on the sculpture studio floor during a long weekend. I had so much fun I did several more, even accepting commissions for a few. The University’s art gallery found a perfect spot for two of them, flanking the entrance, and they are now on permanent display just outside the Spori Gallery. There are benches there and the area is commonly used as a gathering place for students and I used to love hanging out anonymously to hear how people reacted to the works.








PROMETHEUS Acrylic on Canvas 28" x 36" Private Collection

PROMETHEUS Acrylic on Canvas 28" x 36" Private Collection

After graduation I kept up the production pace, producing five more of the 5’ x 9’ paintings, when I caught the attention of an art dealer in the area, Donald Sheahan. He was very excited about my work and offered to put together a show for me in the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown Seattle. I think I only had about 2 weeks to punch out something like 26 more paintings. Because of the wall configurations I had paint several smaller canvases as well, and I found the variety of sizes to be quite liberating. I actually had to miss my own art opening as it was scheduled for just after I moved to Boston with my husband (he was attending Harvard for his graduate degree).






PRAIRIE SMOKE Acrylic on Canvas 16" x 24" $150

PRAIRIE SMOKE Acrylic on Canvas 16" x 24" $150

I took a few years off because I didn’t have the space to paint in Boston and we also had started a family, but in 2006 I was able to arrange a second solo exhibition in the Spori Art Gallery at Brigham Young University – Idaho. In a similar frenzy to the first, I painted a couple dozen paintings in two weeks or so. I was in heaven setting up my work in the beautiful Spori Art Gallery. My husband and I did just about everything ourselves – make the frames, stretch the canvases, arrange the walls, and even set the lights, and in the end, I was very pleased with how beautifully the show came together. There had been some skepticism about how well an abstract expressionist show would do in the Inter-Mountain West, where most folks are used to pictures of wildlife and nature, but I was excited to bring something different to the area, and I think the response was amazing.




DIVERGENT Acrylic on Canvas 16" x 24" Private Collection

DIVERGENT Acrylic on Canvas 16" x 24" Private Collection

Now with three kids to take care of and still no studio I don’t get to paint as much as I’d like, but I’ve been trying to do smaller-scale oil canvases and watercolors, as well as a few abstract-expressionist style paintings on my balcony.