"Monumental Oils"
Wilder Nightingale Fine Art presents a solo exhibition of large-format landscape paintings by Kit Lynch. Lynch’s paintings feel animated, almost filmic, like Van Gogh on fast forward. Everything that is still in a traditional landscape is in motion in Lynch’s work. Water, wind, clouds, leaves, branches, churches and barns are enlivened by a single living, breathing force that implies unity and interdependence. Lynch has a particular affinity for water. Paintings that do not foreground wild waterfalls and electrified, water-saturated dark skies hold the promise of a storm on the high wind. Nature is unleashed and untamed in these paintings. When human architecture is depicted, it is precariously situated, at the whim of nature.
The monumental oils are a departure; Lynch has been an on-location pastel painter for twenty years, producing primarily the small works that pastel and plein aire dictate. She calls the current body of work “a show of imagination, exaggeration and places of the heart. . . . Northern New Mexico is about space, light, and magic. It had to be done big.”
Lynch refers to these works as “harnessed emotion,” but there is little that feels controlled about them. They are freewheeling, boundless, and kinetic. The harnessing, according to Lynch, has to do with her transference of her own interior storms onto the neutral ground of the landscape: “My strong emotions are harnessed and exaggerated through the use of line, color, temperature, value, and composition.” This body of work, she continues, “is an adventure in distilling . . . the [pure] experience of light, color, sound, and weather.”
About her process, Lynch says, “I make all decisions while standing fifteen feet in front of my easel. This keeps my focus on achieving . . . impact, [rather than on] details.” When at work in front of her easel, Lynch is in constant motion, dashing from the long view to the canvas and back again, and shifting her position to catch every change in natural light. This kinetic energy comes through in the paintings.
