Kathryn Lynch paints like a poet, evoking emotion through eloquent imagery. On long walks through her New York neighborhood, she lets life whirl around her, a kinetic routine punctuated by perception. Certain scenes settle in her unconscious and resurface inside her studio as sketches: A tree-lined street laced with electric lines, cherry blossoms in peak blush, a ship docking. As paintings, these moments in time feel vague yet familiar, more of a suggestion than specific. “I am painting the poetry of place rather than the place,” Kathryn said. “It’s a boat anywhere, its a sky for everyone. It’s nowhere and everywhere.”
Though the places and elements that inspire Lynch vary from year to year and place to place, her method and her undertaking have remained the same. Her visual poems begin with moments wrapped in memory. Painterly and patient, Lynch lets her unconscious unpack what it has seen – prosaic subject matter that, through excavation and simplification, emerge as transcendent testaments to essentialism and the universality of human experience in nature. “Life is beautiful even in its simplest forms,” she said. “Beauty is found in unsuspecting places.”
Kathryn has cultivated the beauty of process and place. Working up a sketch, she waits until the scene feels right and then turns to her easel and oils. She paints one piece at a time, focusing all of her attention on that lone, elastic moment. Ruminating as she does, themes tend to emerge in each body of work. Landscapes are rendered timeless, parsed into near symbols: a road is represented by an intrepid cascade of ochre red, cars emerge as suggestive lines and blots of safety-orange, the sun is emphatically reduced to a vermillion orb. In paint handling, Lynch is sparing, working with confident brushstrokes in thinly veiled washes thrown open by the climactic flash of a brilliant tangerine sun or speckled lights of city life. Lynch uses these snapshots of memory and feeling to create dream-like and distinctly atmospheric works that not only capture the drama of different hours of the day and effects of light and time on a place, but also the experience of being present in those times, lights and places, of being within and subject to nature.
“I am not painting a specific place, I’m painting a specific mood and feeling about a place,” Kathryn said. “Seasons change the moods and feelings about a place. Many a poet has based their poetry on seasons, and I am basing my paintings on seasons.” A sage of place, Kathryn parses the new accumulation of imagery into universally resonant moments.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Kathryn Lynch received her undergraduate degree from William Smith College in Geneva, NY, and an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist Fellow in Painting in 2018. She has been invited to Skowhegan, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center. Since earning her MFA, Lynch has held solo exhibitions and participated in well over thirty group shows both and internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA and Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, as well as many corporate collections, including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and the Millennium Art Collection in the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park, in NYC. The artist lives in Catskill, NY, and works in a curated artist campus called Foreland.