FIELDS OF TIME

FIELDS OF TIME
BY KATHRYN LYNCH
“Paintings are alive when they’re good. It’s got to exist and be ok to exist…”

-Kathryn Lynch
TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Fields of Time, an exhibition of oil paintings by artist Kathryn Lynch, on view February 18^th through March 27^th, 2022. With this solo exhibition, her fifth with Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Kathryn Lynch performs poetic symbiosis with oil paint, her preferred, even venerated, medium. Landscapes are rendered timeless, parsed into near symbols-a mountain represented by a naïve wiggle of misty indigo, the surface of a lake a singular, shimmery line. In paint handling, the artist is sparing, working in confident brushstrokes in thinly veiled washes thrown open by the unexpected flash of a brilliant tangerine sun. Her language is that of the quintessential human experience, lapping up the wonder of nature. Lynch here triumphantly conveys "her crowning achievement as a painter: capturing the liminal spaces that define the essence of a given place," as written by painter-critic Patrick Neal.
The artist spends her life painting and walking, though the two are nearly indistinguishable. “I’m always painting. I paint through everything. I paint where I am,” Lynch says. Last summer, the artist received a coveted invitation to return to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture as an alumnus (’91), which provided the inspiration for many of the paintings on view. Walking along the shores of Lake Wesserunsett, she not only retraced the footsteps of countless painters, sculptors and artists who have attended the prestigious program as alumni and faculty, Alex Katz, Diana al-Hadid and Helen Frankenthaler among them. She also captures that unspoken, universal feeling of human-in-nature in paint.
An aspiring New Yorker from birth despite a Philadelphia childhood, Lynch often transcribes the pulse and energy of the city into her canvases. This exhibition, however, focuses entirely on the idyllic countryside—lakes, mountains, bountiful florals—the artists rediscovered in upstate New York and rural Maine during and following the New York lockdown. The human is always implied, however allusively, be it light glimpsed through a window reflected on a lake in nighttime or in the eyes of the viewer-as-painter. We see as Lynch sees. Dandelions float unencumbered in a sea of electric chartreuse – fields of time encapsulated in paint.
“I’m never really painting dandelions,” the artist says. “Who are we? What are we? That’s what I’m painting.”
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 across the United States, and participated in well over thirty group shows. 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 and works between Gowanus, Brooklyn and Foreland, an artist-run campus in Catskill, New York.