At the UW-Madison, Byrd was a contemporary of other prominent artists including Aaron Bohrod, Warrington Colescott, Raymond Gloeckler, Walter Hamady, Harvey Littleton, Alfred Sessler, John Wilde, and Santos Zingale.

Byrd’s interest in figurative painting started in the early 1950s, and this work emphasized social realism, angst and banality in the twentieth century, and auto-biographical fantasy.

[1][2][3][4][5][6] Early influences on Byrd included the abstract expressionists and modernists Lyonel Feininger, Willem de Kooning, John Marin, and Mark Rothko, as well as the realist Edward Hopper.

Around 1980 Byrd turned away from a narrative, psychological approach and focused his work on the rural landscapes, receiving widespread recognition for this shift in style that emphasized composition, lighting, and mood.

“His subject matter is very much of our time: anomie and alienation, military service and domesticity, flashy commercialism and enduring values; the interrelationship between the artifact and natural environment and formal invention”.

By 1962, he was increasingly concerned about the implications of his Shawnee Indian ancestry, a topic he returned through throughout his life and explored through social commentary that emphasized racial bias, and the national struggle for equality (for example “Incident”, an exhibit-winning piece which was hung in the Madison WI mayor’s office, and "The Difference").

Subsequently, he painted spartan and geometric interiors, often populated with strange assortments of figures, animate and inanimate, clad and unclad, conveying a perceptible aura of unease.

[14][20] These elaborately layered, and richly evocative scenes often had atypical lighting conditions, with highlighted rear-lit trees, shadows cast by the rise and set of the sun and moon, and rare violet haze.

They also reveal a mastery of implied perspective, defining nuances of distance through glowing planes of subtly differentiated color, often vibrating with deep and complex emotion (see examples).

As his physical skills declined, elaborately layered oils gave way to rich translucent pastels often with simplified pictorial elements emphasizing light, shadow and form.

This remarkable shift to landscapes in his mid-50s while dealing with a physically-debilitating disease was extremely well-received by critics and collectors, and his shows during this productive decade regularly sold out.

[14] Byrd’s willingness to explore and change topics and approaches has in some ways defied placing him in a single category, perhaps lessening his recognition and appreciation of the full body of his work.