The News Gazette

Lexington, Virginia / September 2007
by Agnes Carbrey

"ARM-WRESTLING A PAINTING"
ANN LYNE EXPLAINS HER APPROACH TO PAINTING, DRAWING

I had heard about Ann Lyne, a Richmond artist, and had admired her bold, colorful paintings for years. When she came to the Lexington in 2001, after a brief residence in Warm Springs, she brought a freshness and enthusiasm for art and a remarkable history of shows in museums and galleries.

Now, in the peak of her career, she inspires admiration in younger artists. She brings us the thrill of someone who has been out in the world, someone we can learn from.

“I think of my paintings as a puzzle to solve, an emotion to understand, a question to answer.”

This year, four decades of drawings and paintings will be installed in the permanent collection of Longwood Center for the Visual Arts in Farmville. In addition, Richmond collector Jack Blanton has just donated his lifetime art collection with many of Ann’s paintings to the Longwood Center.

Director of the Longwood Center Johnson Bowles said, “Ann’s work epitomizes the spirit and energy of Virginia itself through her passionate brushstrokes, subtle and enigmatic color, and an emotional quality that seems to ruminate on the rich connections between past and present as well as between people and their environment.”

For this story, I drew upon my conversations with Ann throughout the summer, as we met in her Lexington studio to get 1,200 drawings ready for Longwood.

In her life and in her art, Ann Lyne takes risks. Though born and raised in Richmond, she has kayaked in Class Four white water, ridden unbroken horses, and shot guns with the locals. She was a student of artist Theresa Pollak at Richmond Professional Institute, School of the Arts. In 1981, she graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts from American University. She married and raised three children while she continued to paint. Like her life, her art work has endured with an adventurous, confident spirit.

And she is endlessly curious, constantly searching, experimenting with big ideas and probing, destroying and reworking. “Arm-wrestling a painting,” she calls it. “One has to muscle up and pull it together. It’s about honest energy, not just ‘control.’”

This process gives the paintings an intriguing texture, from smooth passages of pleasing harmony to sudden, bold areas of raw, clotted color and unresolved visual tension. For this reason, the paintings will challenge the average viewer to consider images that are eerily beautiful and strangely, but not quite, familiar.

Ann said, “The main point of a painting is its structure. Get the abstract language first, the structure, the spine, the skeleton to hold it together: you have to get that stuff straight in the beginning and work the whole thing. Once that is established, you find a way to fill in the negative space with something beautiful.”

Thus, in her flowers and table still life, she seduces us with something inviting and comforting, like the beautiful decorative pattern of an old 1940s tablecloth, and then takes a turn and leads us down the road to a very different conclusion.

In a still life entitled, “Lilies and India Cloth,” a violent face-off is taking place in a lovely setting. Stark black and white tablecloth fragments fly off an up-ended table, in a conflict between representation and abstraction. Fluid masses of paint, like wet clay, build a messy emotional path across the canvas. A menacing green patch defends the corner against an elegant blue-green pitcher that looks like it was borrowed from a Matisse painting.

She entices us down a twist in the path to someplace deeply unknown, like the composer Shostakovich, who will catch your ear with a lovely little melody. But then as we agreeably follow that quaint tune merrily along, it suddenly goes weird. We end up somewhere very surprising, in a strange and fascinating distortion of the familiar. Although she herself does not play an instrument, her love of music has had a profound effect on her work.

While living in Bath County, she did many drawings at the Garth Newel Music Center. Evelyn Grau, violist with the Garth Newel Quartet said, “Ann would set up in the [recital] hall and quietly draw while we rehearsed. She has a wonderful way of capturing movement on paper with very few strokes.”

Ann also worked at live rehearsals of the Richmond Symphony, depicting the passion and delicacy of the conductor’s movements with quick dashes of paint.

Ann’s association with music goes even deeper in terms of the underlying design of her paintings: one can compare her work to that of another modern composer, the American Charles Ives. Like his compositional work, she will introduce two themes at once. For example, Ives, who was the son of a marching band director, will suggest in his composition two marching bands playing at same time, but playing two different songs.

Ann’s need for visual tension often plays out as the two aspects of an emotion in a struggle on the surface of the canvas. As the two aspects push and pull against one another, they create a crisis of unpredictability and unstable power. That exciting struggle is what makes Ann’s paintings alive: they acknowledge the contradictions, the unease, the mystery that we recognize in ourselves.

She compares painting to the accidental finding of treasure. “We are digging for something that challenges our thinking. Our curiosity is never satisfied. We are ‘hounds’ for sincerity, and we can smell honesty.

This sincerity and honesty is her common theme which spans subjects from still life paintings to landscapes of Rockbridge and Bath County, or the many animal sketches she has done on location in barns and training rings.

“I saw a woman drawing in the gazebo at the horse center,” recalled Pete Hecht, manager of the horse show at the 2004 Rockbridge Regional Fair. “She thought I would make her leave, but I just wanted to see what she was doing. With charcoal, she was drawing my wife, Sue, and others, as they drove their horses and carriages around the ring: I took some of those drawings and printed them as the official T-shirt for the fair.”

Ann explained, “I was introduced to horses as a child: I was always hanging out in the barn. Much later, when my children began riding lessons, I had to kill some time so I started sketching.”

Ann paints all day, at least six days a week. She starts at 6 a.m. and works into the early afternoon. Her friends do not dare to call or visit during her work hours; her concentration is so fierce, you might find yourself unwelcome.

In 1981, when she had become an established painter and was exhibiting her work in galleries, her education began again. She was invited to Yaddo, an exclusive artist colony on an estate in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “At Yaddo, you are invited as a guest,” Ann said. “You are provided gourmet meals, a room and a studio. You dine in the company of famous composers, visual artists and writers, surrounded by gargoyles and Tiffany chandeliers.” It was at Yaddo that she had an epiphany about the seriousness of what creative artists do. “Here you are in this beautiful setting, with the ‘the cream of the crop,’” Ann said. “You see all around the gravity of your gift, the responsibility to use the special tool given to you. Then you have to earn it and you find that there is no fooling around, no time to do anything untrue.”

As well as relief from the daily responsibilities of life, Yaddo provided the nourishment that allowed her to dig deeper to utilize her creative gift. She is an example to those of us who know that there is an artist inside, but have yet to give it full expression. For some, it may have been snuffed out, for others it pounds like a poverty from the inside. “If you want to make art,” Ann said, “you have to sacrifice superficiality and some security.”

This year Ann had shows at the Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, N.C. and at the Les Yeux du Monde Gallery in Charlottesville. Now, in Lexington, a selection of paintings and drawings that reflects all aspects of her work will be on view through Oct. 7 at Studio Eleven Gallery.

Her work has also been shown at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Chrysler Museum, the Owensboro Museum and the Mint Museum. Corporate fine art collections include Best Products Inc., Philip Morris, U.S. Bell Atlantic and The Federal Reserve Bank.

Ann Lyne is a permanent resident of Lexington, but for several months each year she retreats from Virginia to upstate New York in Germantown. A converted carriage house on a ridge above the Hudson River serves as her studio. Ann said, “Up on this ridge, the sky is brilliant blue, the air is clear. While I paint, I hear the music of nature, crickets and the horns of boats and trains. I’ve learned patience and to trust my instinct.”

Editor’s note:

Agnes Carbrey is a practicing artist well known to many in the area. The Rockbridge County resident currently teaches at the James Madison University School of Art and Art History. She worked previously as assistant to the director of the Vanderwoude-Tanabaum Gallery in New York and was the director of the Olin-Smoyer Galleries at Roanoke College.