Kevin Lyons is my mentor, well, one of them.
I had the privilege of working with and around Kevin at Urban Outfitters for roughly 7 years. Kevin's resume is pretty impressive and includes Creative Director @ Urban Outfitters, Creative Director @ Stussy, art director @ Tokion, typography professor @ Pratt, amongst a multitude of others achievements in the corporate design world as well as "fine art" world with a series of international exhibitions. I had always been a HUGE fan of his work when I was in college and when I graduated I started working at Urban... 7 years later I'm on my own and learned so much from him (and others @ UO) but it was a real honor to have worked with an artist that you have always admired. Now, I no longer think of him as someone to learn from, or as a friend, but more like the older brother I never wanted. My second year of working at Urban I had ALMOST cut the tip of my finger off in a freak accident and about a month later we had corporate end of the fiscal year meetings in Philadelphia with the CEO & Presdent etc all in attendance. Kevin gave a presentation showcasing the future art direction of UO, and about every fifth slide was a random image that he culled from Google Images of severed hands and fingers etc. and he continually announced throughout his 30 minute presentation "...and this is Chris Bettig's finger." It was very non-challant, and he breezed by them as though it was nothing... he'd be talking and showing slides of the new 3d store signs, or the new graphics, type treatments, then a bloody finger, then right back to business. Anyway, for that and everything else, thanks Kevin.
Kevin Lyons is blogging for Arkitip and has a really interesting series going of the 100 most influential people, a theme which appears in his work quite a bit... makes for some good reading.
Kevin Lyons is also the founder of Natural Born.
Kevin is now @ Anomaly.
