NYAB Event - Kathryn Lynch “A View of One’s Own, Part 1”

Kathryn Lynch “A View of One’s Own, Part 1”

Sears-Peyton Gallery

This event has ended.

While summer may feel a world away for many New Yorkers, in Kathryn Lynch’s exhibition A View of One’s Own, the artist’s gestural impressions of her experiences and environment on Shelter Island evoke New York’s sunny rural islands and pitched blue seas. In this first part of the exhibition, (the second will feature paintings of Red Hook), painterly washes of aqua and cobalt blue usher viewers into the breezy days of summer on Shelter Island. Windows or cottage doorways frame views of the summer refuge in the Long Island Sound, suggesting an observer’s position—a space of quiet enjoyment and contemplation where the painter hovers between interior and exterior, assembling each painted moment from fragments of experience seen and felt.

The exhibition title echoes Virginia Woolf’s declaration that a writer (and perhaps an artist) must have “a room of one’s own,” but also, as Lynch says “how we see—our own internal thoughts act as a window or door to how we see the world…we are a combination of looking out and looking within.”

Lynch’s associative process of gathering impressions, memories, and feelings of her experiences and surroundings results in paintings that evoke more than they explain. Lynch stitches fragments of everyday life into poetic re-imaginings that recollect and reinterpret the world with her signature blend of painterly acumen, cultural allusion, and wit.

With their strikingly different atmospheres, yet related painterly forms and surfaces, this two-part exhibition of Lynch’s works offers a view from the artist’s perch as keen observer, cultural producer, and witty commentator. Among the boats, bridges, and seagulls, we find the familiar cadence of Lynch’s fluency with brush, light, space, and something more ephemeral—the shape and color of each fleeting experience, and the salty taste of summer.