PLUMB 24" x
24" WSKG PRICE: $475
Lynne Taetzsch was born in East
Orange, New Jersey and grew up in Irvington and Newark, New
Jersey. She was interested in art from the time she was a
child, spending her allowance on arts and crafts supplies, painting
the school windows for the holidays, and winning a class drawing
contest in eighth grade. As a young teenager she took
oil-painting lessons from a local artist and later she was
president of her high-school art club.
At Rutgers University, the
University of Southern California, and the University of
California, Lynne took art classes in painting, print-making,
drawing and pottery. But the biggest influence on her art was
the two years she spent at Cooper Union for the Advancement of
Science and Art in New York City, where she had classes in
calligraphy, architectonics, one and two dimensional design, life
drawing, and painting. This is when her work gradually became more
abstract as she experimented with collage materials in an intense
focus on composition.
Lynne has lived in Florida,
California, New Jersey, Virginia, Kentucky, and now in the
beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York State. She's worked as a
secretary, a writer, an editor, a publisher, a junior-high English
and Math teacher (six months), a business trainer and manager, a
Kirby vacuum cleaner salesperson (one week), a leather crafter, and
a college professor. Through most of it, she kept painting, and
since the spring of 2000 she has been painting full time in her
studio in Ithaca, New York.
In the early eighties Lynne switched
from oil paint to acrylics. She found that acrylics fit her style
better because they dry quickly. She works on a painting over many
days, adding layers that accumulate without totally eradicating the
previous images. She paints standing up, listening to jazz,
classical, or rock and roll. The process of painting in broad
gestures with a brush or palette knife gives her work its sense of
intense energy. Like jazz, the heart of her art is
improvisation.
Lynne's work has been shown in solo
and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the
United States and abroad. Stan Bowman, professor
emeritus of the Cornell University Art Department, said in
a review of Lynne's exhibit at the Clinton House ArtSpace in
Ithaca: "Taetzsch is a painter very much in the tradition of
the best of 20th century abstraction."
Describing her
painting process, Lynne says: I am of course indebted to all
the artists who came before me, for the wonderful ways they have
transmuted color, line and shape. Some of my very special art
connections are Miro, Kandinsky, Matisse, DeKooning, Hans Hoffman,
Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell.
In the early stages of a
painting, I work very fast. This helps give my art
its sense of energy and spontaneity. I like to trick my
conscious mind by not letting it have too much control over what
happens. In some ways I'm creating a mess or a problem that I
then have to solve in order to make the painting work.
It's the painting surface that I
love - the lusciousness of color in its thick and thin varieties,
flat and opaque to keep the eye on the surface, or transparent and
airy to suggest deep space. My goal is to stay as close to the edge
as possible, to keep that sense of organic happening, as if the
painting had grown itself rather than having been crafted by
me.
Artist's Statement
My work was influenced in the early
1960s by the New York school of abstract expressionists, including
Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Hans Hoffman, and Robert
Motherwell. What drew me to this work was its sense of
improvisation, high energy, and an emphasis on the painting
process. Instead of using paint to carry out a visual idea, I
was thrilled to discover the visual idea through the process of
creating it.
The iconography in my work comes
from a lifetime of personal and cultural experience. As a
young girl in the 1950s, I resented the limited role assigned to
women, and sought to break away from it. I emulated my three
older brothers, and wanted to act in this world of men by
accomplishing significant things. I eschewed "women's work,"
and therefore didn't learn the joy of cooking until I had left home
and was forced to cook for myself.
I used strong colors and forceful
gestures in my painting, avoiding any effect that might be deemed
"feminine." I took it as a compliment when someone said to me
once, "You paint like a man." It was only years later, as I
matured, that I could embrace the delicate, the patterned, and even
pastel colors in my art.
Two signs that are integral to my
work are the circle and the X. Through the circular
shapes and lines on my canvases, I embrace the feminine.
While I still prefer to wear loose clothing that does not reveal my
own body's curves, I do enjoy filling my art with circles and eggs
in abundance.
As for the Xs in my
paintings, sometimes making one is an act of "crossing-out"
what has come before. Making an X is a way of saying
"no" to the world. In a way, X's are the opposite of
O's, and mixing them expresses my ambivalence. X is
a primitive kind of mark that may come from the unconscious, a kind
of making your mark or staking out your territory. X
accumulates meanings.
There is also a physical
satisfaction in making an X, especially a large one that
fills up a canvas. It feels decisive to make this strong
mark. At other times, the X is simply playful.
When I was a young girl, my
grandmother spent hours trying to teach me how to make paper
flowers. She was a true artist, but I resisted this "women's
craft," and grew bored. My mother loved flowers, and always
planted a garden of them, but I, again, resisted this path.
It was only later in life that floral and leaf designs showed up in
my art.
As my personal history and culture
are my life's foundation, each layer I paint on a canvas becomes
the history of its surface. These layers accumulate and
influence, yet not always overtly. Like sediment, they
build. By mixing the acrylic paint with water and gloss
medium to make a thin wash, the translucent quality of top layers
reveal aspects of the painting's history. At other times, a
thick impasto hides the past. Yet it is there beneath the
surface and has had its influence nonetheless.
