Kathryn Lynch

"Taking long walks give me all the subject matter I need for my paintings. They are a combination of remembering, forgetting, seeing and inventing. Growing up we were the only family without a car, wlaking is how we got around and since then I have always preferred walking to all other means of transportation. The speed of walk is conducive to thinking and dreaming. I catch plimpses of all my next paintings on each walk I take. One always gets somewhere when they put one food in front of the other with determination."

–Kathryn Lynch

"Sometimes we see something better when we don’t look directly at it. This thought permeated my viewing of Kathryn Lynch’s impressive paintings at Turn Gallery on the Upper East Side. Her current exhibition, fittingly titled “Between the Streets,” showcases her crowning achievement as a painter: capturing the liminal spaces that define the essence of a given place.

"The show consists of city scenes painted simply – innocent, almost childlike renderings of buildings with towers or steeples, a monument, cars on streets, trains on elevated tracks, a boat on the water, a few trees here and there. The compositions are loose and gestural without detail or fuss, but still manage to suggest different seasons, weather, times of day, and places. Undistracted by minutiae, the viewer is free to enjoy terse paint handling that represents scenes while distilling mood, transience, and history onto one plane, like dreams rendering reality as a patchwork. The subjects have just enough specificity to allow familiarity, and the paint delivers emotive power. Many of the paintings resolve around one dominant and evocative color that suffuses the field of the canvas or panel."

"Artist Kathryn Lynch does not take it as an insult if you call her work “primitive.” Far from it. Though she prefers to call herself a “simplist” – more specifically a “representational simplist,” she is quick to point out that it is “very hard to be simple.”

"Her paintings, she says, look so easy they inspire others to pick up a brush. Then they discover: “‘Damn, that’s hard.’ They don’t understand why it doesn’t work.”"

"Over her more than 25 years painting and exhibiting her work in New York and elsewhere, Kathryn Lynch has established herself as a painter whose works harness the lush materiality of paint to gesture towards subjects seemingly beyond the frame—relationships, change, the passing of time. On the occasion of Kathryn Lynch’s two-part exhibition, A View of One’s Own at Sears-Peyton Gallery, I sat down with the painter to talk about her life, paintings, and the curiously dictatorial tendencies of her shapes."

"It’s a good thing Kathryn Lynch is a committed walker, since she doesn’t like to drive, and the subway stop nearest her Red Hook studio is more than a mile away. But there is a more important reason for her perambulations. “I make sure that every day I have to walk everywhere,” she said recently at her studio, a relatively small but high-ceilinged space in an industrial building.

“'As I’m walking, it tells me what I’m painting next. I never look for it. But once it grabs you, you have to paint it. For me, the motion of walking leads to ideas.'"

"The most enchanting pieces were the night scenes. They capture the intrigue of the seemingly expansive harbor. The large work Tug in Night, for instance, features a lone boat navigating dark waters in the dead of night. Shining lights from distant ships provide faint visibility, but nearby forms are indiscernible. Lynch’s thick application of paint on paper caused the work to buckle and form wavelike ripples. The glossy finish is reminiscent of the surface of the reflective waters. Though Lynch’s techniques are highly simplified, her visual effects are captivating."

Essay by Jonathan Lee to coincide with Kathryn Lynch's exhibition, A Silent Language.

"Lynch is a self-described simplist. She seems more interested in light and dark than in a broad bustle of color, and she is drawn to unfussy subjects: flowers, the sea, the slur of Manhattan traffic; simple pleasures and textures. Her often-flat forms and rounded edges give much of her work a storybook quality."

"Artist Kathryn Lynch feels right at home using the back area of this gigantic 4,000- square-foot floor of an old Tribeca recording studio as her art studio. But, to me, the winding trip between wooden crates to actually get to Kathryn's work felt a bit spooky, the only sound being the wind clanking the iron gate outside.

"Kathryn has claimed 2,500 square feet of the floor as her studio area. She brought all the furniture she uses here with her, including her painting table, which has traveled with her from one studio home to another since 1994."

"Kathryn Lynch wrinkles her nose when people refer to her work as landscape painting. "That's like something you get at a tag sale," says the New York City-based artist, who is more likely to align herself with tortured Expressionistic painters like Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach than masters of the pastoral Hudson River School. Though her large, moody canvases show the beach outside her Long Island summer house on Shelter Island and the skyline viewed from her SoHo studio. Lynch regards her images as abstract rather than realistic. In a process she calls "a combination of remembering and forgetting," she collects visual data from her daily surroundings, then transforms it into dreamlike depictions."

"Ms. Lynch paints in Mr. Mooreís buildings, on whatever floor is empty, sharing space with the construction workers, who use a corner to have their lunch and smoke their cigarettes. (Itís an amicable arrangement, only once disturbed by an asbestos removal company worker who removed a canvas from its stretcher and tried to make away with it. Ms. Lynch intercepted him downstairs. ìOh,î he said, flummoxed. ìThe place didnít look, uh, private.î) But the construction crew is always supportive, she said, providing kindly criticism and help when she moves, which is, of course, often. Still, moving a studio is harder even than moving with young children, Ms. Lynch said. And she reckons she has moved her studio more times than she has moved her family."