Lynda Lowe

Exploring the woods near my home and returning with the artifacts from those adventures are some of my earliest memories. This is an activity I continue to deeply value and my “cabinet of curiosities” has grown as I’ve traveled further afield. In all this collecting, wondering, and observing, I’ve learned that no thought or thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert, but is charged with complex content and a sentient presence. In the contemplative hours of painting these objects, I am aware of their specific architecture, and also of their ineffable character.

I have long been interested in how we construct meaning through pathways involving reason, intuition, sensation, memory, and spirit. Many of these perceptual fields are employed in my work’s conceptual development as well as in my process.

I begin the work by incising the unpainted surface with etched marks, text fragments, mathematical formulas, and diagrammatic drawings. In the finished work, some of these are barely visible unless closely inspected. This detail and marginalia refer to the constant stream of enigmatic data that surround all experience. At every level of life, from jiggling subatomic quanta to stars and galaxies, information is moving back and forth. These embedded figures represent the buzz of this exchange, cause and effect reactions, particle collisions, and all those intriguing occurrences that happen behind the screen of easy observation.

Surfaces are further developed by intuitively adding and subtracting many layers of color to develop a rich patina that suggests time and weather. The palette is often chosen as a result of an experience with a strong color presence connected to observations, travels or memory - the deep lacquered red of Asian antiquities, the atmospheric color of the Sahara sand and sky, a burnished wall revealing generations of paint and graffiti, the saffron swath of fabric draping a temple statue.

In my recent work, simple imperfect vessels act as principal characters; their quiet presence is a counterpoint to the layered details and colors of the background.  The vessel is employed as a metaphor and archetype possessing a full range of associations, numinous and commonplace, conscious and unconscious. Jungian archetypes suggest that the vessel represents the inexplicable contents of the complex unconscious mind. They are also simply the familiar comfortable objects of everyday domestic life. The body is a vessel that transports the physical-self through the various actions of the day, and also the soulish-self that finds meaning in those same experiences. My use of the image might suggest all of these notions. It first appeared in my work after travels to Tibet.  The begging bowls of monks and the offertory vessels on monastery altars powerfully reminded me that giving and receiving can be seen as a singular fluid act.

The layered mélange I employ of such seemingly random and unlikely couplings, cultural philosophies, archetypes, and scientific observations are deliberately integrated to point towards what intrinsically connects us to the larger human experience and our surrounding world. What can be quantified and measured lies alongside what is mysterious and infinite; what is spoken and not yet spoken are part of any given moment.

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