I have always painted from observation.

I started painting in the landscape.  I liked being outdoors and racing the light before it changed, rearranging the colors and shapes I’d found.

But I soon succumbed to New York’s winters and stayed indoors, where I set up still life arrangements as substitutes for the landscape. I discovered that I liked finding the shapes and colors in arrangements of vegetables, boxes and cloth from which I could construct “landscapes” and dramas of my own devising, and I loved the slower pace that still life provided.

In all my painting, what compels me is exploring the tension between what I see and what I can invent as an equivalent in two dimensions.  I want to paint paintings in which each gesture – color or line – has multiple meanings. The ochre does more than name the “pear”; it has a relationship with a yellow, or red or green; it’s color and drawing.  

I love the transformation of the seen into the language of color and shape.  I want my paintings to tell the non-verbal stories that only painting can tell.

Lynn was reluctant to discuss her own painting, and on only one occasion did she agree to talk publicly about her work. Here are excerpts from that talk:

 

I loved Bonnard’s dinner tables and the clutter of Fairfield Porter’s breakfast, but I wasn’t attracted to found arrangements as a subject for my own work.

There’s something in the act of choosing and arranging that compels me.

 
 
 
 

I start with an object—or a small group of objects whose color and shape engage me. I put them on a tabletop and then move them around. I’m exploring ways to make them relate to one another, to belong together. I am looking for an arrangement that feels necessary.

 
 

I do some quick drawings. The drawing helps me to identify trouble areas in the setup. I change things. Of course, moving things around introduces new relationships and problems. Often I decide to go ahead anyway. Those areas that I couldn’t figure out in the drawing are always trouble in the painting.

It’s okay; I like a certain amount of trouble.

 
 
 
 
 
 

I can’t emphasize enough how much—despite the fact that I’m setting these up in a very conscious way—I find what I love in the process of looking and painting.

 
 
 

What I look for are those moments when I leave my conscious and knowing self behind and disappear into the experience of looking, and finding equivalents for that experience through color and drawing.

 
 
 
 
 

Everything that I paint—all the objects, the tables, chairs, the fabrics—are things that I’ve found—and always when I’m not really looking...

It always seems when I find something that it’s what I’ve been looking for all along.