-Lydon's work was featured in a piece on HANG ART over at Apartment Therapy.

-Lydon was interviewed for Current TV's The Current Gallery. Watch the video here.

-Lydon's painting 'Transoxide' is featured in the September 2005 issue of Real Simple magazine. See it here .

Art Week Volume 35, Issue 10, Dec. 2004/Jan. 2005 --- Barbara Morris

'Hotdog Highway' at 21 Grand:
...Currently, 21 Grand provides Oakland with a nicely finished, medium sized gallery and performance space; the exhibition on view was a grouping of paintings that also provided the illustrations for a collaborative artists' book, Hotdog Highway. Jeannie Lydon and Alison Tharp, who both attended the California College of the Arts, are the artists behind this confrontational, yet playful work. The works were hung attractively on the walls, each piece offering the viewer an engaging and largely compelling experience. While the book is a collaborative work, the individual paintings were apparently created independently. Lydon favors the clean look of realism, her toothy female figures harkening to advertising imagery. . .
Lydon's cleaner work sometimes offers a kind of relief from the pathological whimsy of Tharp-a straightforward image of a car dashboard in Driving for example, is painted in a sure and elegant style, low-key tones of brown and ochre suggesting restraint and good taste. The good taste departs the stage, for the most part, in the images of maniacally grinning women who seem to be having altogether too much of a good time. In works such as Piggyback, they appear young, self-confident and seductive, with clingy T-shirts and impeccable makeup, yet, as the characters in the narrative reveal, they possess a strong dark side. The thick black lines outlining each tooth could suggest moray decay, or merely, as the nicotine-addicted characters in the book might display, tobacco stains. Surefooted and bold handling of hair and clothing give the works a sense of authenticity and visual punch. . .
Lydon and Tharp are clearly talented young women, with attitude to spare. . . Substantial gifts as artists, with strong poetic vision, will open up a variety of paths to the pair as they advance in their careers. Irreverence, confidence and a quirky sense of humor may be their strongest assets. I look forward to seeing what kinds of projects will attract them in the future.

East Bay Express Billboard, Sept. 29-Oct. 5 2004 --- Stefanie Kalem

Artists' books are not just books by artists, nor are they books about art. Rather, they are art pieces that come to the viewer in the form of a book, printed or folded into pages and bound together, a visual surprise disguised as a narrative tome. Disguised, that is, unless the artists' book actually has a story in mind. Such is the case with Hotdog Highway, the first collaboration between artists and longtime friends Jeannie Lydon and Alison Tharp. Hotdog Highway contains three intertwined, somewhat interchangeable road-trip narratives, the text swerving between the art of Lydon and Tharp like a drunken trucker careening around the white lines of an interstate. The original works that went into the book will be on display at 21 Grand.

21 Grand Press Release, 2004 --- Darren Jenkins

Lydon and Tharp have been long time friends, and have followed each others' projects closely. They each have a love for making "artists' books", an artform that often falls somewhere between a sketchbook and the more vernacular phenomenon of zines. Hotdog Highway is their first co-produced artists' book.
The content is three loose narratives, all told intermittently and somewhat exchangeably, based ont the trajectory of a road-trip (presumably along the iconically American Hotdog Highway). They use their visual art to illustrate the text of the book. These original works constitute the bulk of the exhibition. As laid out in each page the images and text mingle in a pastiche fashion that makes sense both as visual composition and further commentary on the text. The visual art itself affects the pastiche of collage, at times by using actual collage, but mostly drawn and painted disparate images sharing the same picture plane.
Lydon's work tends toward the crisp edges of design and printmaking. She has a sure hand for realistic representations of what seems to be partygoers and girls in summer dresses, all cropped as if in odd snapshots. At times wallpaper samples, schematic illustrations, or other nonsequiters may jut up to or interrupt these other images...

San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, Sunday Jun. 20, 2004

With a Song in Her Heart: (in reference to Lydon's contribution to the Hearts in San Francisco public sculpture installation project)
ARTIST'S THOUGHTS: "I came upon this image - the '37 Model M RCA Victor Special portable phonograph - at the Art Deco exhibition at the Legion of Honor. Music is a positive icon of San Francisco, whether it's a large concert, a street person's musical message or a passer-by with an iPod. The Lowrider bicylces screenprinted on the wings of the heart represent the presence of bikes and the athletic sports that are possible year round because of the beautiful sunny skies (hence the yellow acrylic painted background) and the beautiful sparkling dark blue ocean (the blue painted background with specks of copper paint). These two images voice the idea that, because of California's wonderful weather, we can enjoy the atmosphere wheather we are sitting in a park, listening to music, or riding our bikes and slowing down, taking a break from our cars and enjoying San Francisco."

East Bay Express Dec. 2003 --- Lindsey Westbrook

Recycled (Bikes of a bygone era):
Jeannie Lydon paints pictures of outdated transportation: high-wheel tricycles, velocipedes, and fastbacks. Faster, more streamlined ways of getting around have slowly replaced these clunky old machines, but there's still something timeles, an essential "classy" duality, about them. Technological advances may have made bicycles faster, lighter, and safer, but they also stripped out an element of their character. There's just something about handwrought iron that doesn't feel the same when it's translated into aluminum or carbon fiber. Lydon's not only a well-known local artist but also a co-partner in the Door.7.Gallery, a mobile art space that currently lacks a permanent home but has nevertheless garnered a loyal following. Her exhibition opens at EPOCH Frameworks and Gallery on Monday and runs through December 13. . .
Lydon's vivid colors and the relentless focus of her artistic vision make her paintings powerful and unmistakable for anyone else's. She chooses her canvases carefully; often they're thick, almost brick-shaped, evoking something of the heaviness and substantiality of the old-fashioned metal bicycles they depict. They're also a little like time capsules, not only for their container-like shapes, but also their rough and patchy painted surfaces, as if time and the elements have actually weathered them. Numerals in the background, handpainted in the shape of antique letterforms, suggest old maps, as do the crisscrossing lines she paints, which don't seem to be tracing routes so much as marking uncharted territory.
The machines recall an era that at first seems impossibly long ago, but was actually more like an antique (but absolutely recognizable) version of our world today; fantastic as it may sound, the first bicycle trip across America was made on an old two-wheeler just like these, with the big front wheel. Lydon evokes an analogous sensation by painting the accoutrements of a time that is bygone, but not so much so that it's impossible to imagine ourselves a part of it. There is a real feeling of excitement in her pictures: a sense of delving into something that is unknown, yet distantly remembered - something we feel capable of relishing without the least bit of alienation. She suggests a moment in our collective past that was perhaps simpler but nearly as sophisticated, and which, arguably, had a lot more character.

National Art Competition Juror's Statement - 13th Annual Art Competition, Mar. 28, 2003 --- Aaron Fine

. . . Jeanne Lydon takes an image of an old fire truck, then repeats it Andy Warhol style, so that it becomes more of an icon of the past, slapped onto a very flat picture plane of fire-engine red. . .

San Francisco Bay Guardian Critic's Choice, Sept. 2002 --- Lindsey Westbrook

'Connections and Collections: Paintings of Transportation':
Oakland-based artist Jeannie Lydon says she finds inspiration on city streets and in real-life adventures, but her paintings hark back to a much earlier era. Stick-shift bicycles and biplanes are the primary images that show up repeatedly on her canvasses. Somtimes they are painted, other times screen- or linoleum-printed over a patchwork background of lines, shapes, and occasionally a stray floating symbol that might or might not be some kind of compass or map marking. The effect is an intersting combination of antique and contemporary, detailed and abstract. Lydon's printing techniques give the old machines in many of her works a delicate appearance, as if she traced them on top of the fog of memory, denying the iron and steel with which they were made and reducing each solid structural element to a faint, ephemeral outline. Her limited use of color also adds to the mood of antiquity; the world she paints is not quite black-and-white, but almost, suggesting that she is not so much representing what she sees or remembers as she is imagining some kind of past world. Her paintings are like scrapbook pages from someone else's life, decontectualized and unexplained. The bicycles, cars, and planes seem chronologically specific at first - casting her as a kind of Beryl Markham of the canvass - but Lydon's method of presenting them evacuates much of their specificity, chronological and otherwise. Her works are a ghostly presence in the gallery, rooted to no particular time or place.