Lynette Lombard: In Awe: A Furious Love

"Wailing, Setting Sun", Oil on Canvas, 24" x 18", 2022

By Andrea Ferrigno December 13, 2024

Lynette Lombard held the conviction that all truth, all true experience, must be felt through the body. Intentionally reaching into some sacred space beyond rationality, her work reminds us of what it feels like and means to be human in all its complexities- messiness, yearnings, love, loss, and sometimes feeling outright out of control. “In Awe: Lynette Lombard Late Work, 2022-23,” opened November 26 and runs through December 28 at the Bowery Gallery, 547 West 27th St., Chelsea. The works in this exhibition are an outpouring of heart-rending authentic expression created from an innate desire to connect and communicate through the artist’s chosen medium of oil paint, pencil, chalk, and oil pastel. Lombard's work demands that we adjust our focus. In adjusting, it reveals the chasm of opposing agendas and reminds us that we can choose how we see the world. It is time we reclaim the power we can within ourselves and take responsibility for our actions in this world. These paintings are not soft or slick. They do not nod or wink to the cannon. Rather, they possess an active brute force, a sense of immediacy; all concepts are ripe for consideration in this confusing contemporary moment.

Staples Removed, Self Portrait was completed after an emergency surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor that left Lombard without the ability to access language while still being able to understand the language of those around her. Many artists talk about artmaking as a way to go beyond the confines of language. Still, most of us will never fully understand what it is like to rely on our art as the primary avenue for communication, an experience Lynette faced over the last year of her life. Despite these challenging setbacks, she remained a vital presence. Those close to her watched in amazement and humility as she continued to show up, brimming with loving energy, through her work and in person through the end of her life.

"Staples Removed, Self Portrait", Graphite on Paper, 11.5" x 9", 2022

Lombard loved the landscape and saw her approach to painting as a form of activism. Her emphasis on landscape originated from living in the Midwest during the academic year and spending summers in Coastal Spain. There is an impossibility that comes with painting nature from direct observation. There is too much muchness to convey fully. Yet we feel her tenacious dedication to push through, grappling with complexities without resorting to reductionism. Lynette approached nature with profound respect, awe, reverence, and intimacy. In simultaneous revelry, nature and Lynette seemed to rejoice and find their voice in one another. Lombard’s thoughts and feelings about the landscape and paintings are brought to bear, first through her attitude towards the landscape, then the landscape through her, and now directly through our personal experience of the work, a form of phenomenological transference.

The surfaces of the work both attract and repel through their energetic intensity and physicality. In the case of paint, the more paint, the more real the work became for her and now for us. You might miss a world awaiting your discovery if you don’t slow down to look carefully past the surface. The complex flesh of the work will keep those out who don’t care to look with more careful consideration. In such a thickly painted work, the portrait of her father, Papa’s Glasses, we feel her playful tenderness towards her father. I delighted in the subtle doubling where the lenses of her father’s glasses pull his eyes down lower on his face than they should be. His real eyes only hinted at, appearing more slowly, but all there, all present as image and mark.

"Papa's Glasses", Oil on Canvas, 12" x 16", 2021-22

You will not find what is commonly referred to as “negative space” in Lombard’s paintings. There is no distant space to retreat. Lynette does not miss an opportunity to activate the interval. As in music and poetry, the interval space in painting is as important as the objects themselves. In Spring, Monroe Harbor, Spring 2022, the space between each limb becomes thermodynamically charged, containing multiple microcosms in a dynamic, interconnected composition. We are held in this electric storm and then suddenly released to a sailboat on tranquil waters while a small silhouette of a seated figure holds the bottom right of the page.

Like a classical composer, Lombard moves us quickly along passages, slows us down, then hurls us off cliffs only to catch us as we find our limbs bound and briefly held hostage in a new world at a new scale. Before we know it, everything looks differently than it first appeared. Lombard believed that painting should not drift off to some infinite space; the picture plane, the plane of light, is a mystical force that moves and moves us in return. This is undeniable. We are witnesses to this. Like music, it is best when it is played with feeling. Lombard’s paintings are generous in this way. Like a great musical composition, they cut us into a million pieces if we allow ourselves to feel.

By engaging with her compositions' dynamic movements, we break away from a non-linear experience of time. This approach upsets a world focused on control, order, and predictable outcomes; conditions created by the overarching lens of capitalism. A societal structure saturated with injustice, whose momentum is pushing us into automatonic devolvement. Lombard pushes back at a time when it feels we are being intentionally groomed by big tech to profit from our addiction and dependence on screens and the cheap sensations it sells. Lynette’s personal, philosophical, political, and activist approach to painting the landscape tries to reach out of the pictorial space and grab and shake us out of the media-induced cyber-stupor we find ourselves embedded to some degree. The urgency in these late works is palpable.

"Frog, Pond & Spoil Bank", Crayon on Paper, 22" x 30", 2023

Lombard held deep conviction regarding the power of visual language as expressed through the plasticity of space, and embraced the spiritual dimension of the picture plane and the plane of light. Many of these ideas were nourished during her time at The New York Studio School under the tutelage of Mercedes Matter, who studied with Hans Hoffman, and Nicolas Carone, who did not shy away from discussing the mystical and metaphysical aspirations of this approach to painting and drawing. If there is a modernist idea worthy of our continued explorations, despite its glaring Eurocentric roots, it is the concept of plasticity, particularly as it relates to Nicolas Carone’s teachings as a tool to access the unconscious. This is relevant and immensely valuable but critically lacking in most contemporary arts education.

We feel the rhythms of the masses in Lynette’s compositions. Carone’s approach to drawing and engaging with “the rhythm of the masses” is an erotic stance, harkening to Audre Lorde’s ideas in Uses of the Erotic. It is about the metaphysical underpinnings of paintings’ and drawings' ability to touch truth, to find real form through "feeling" the mass, evolving into an argument for a metaphysical symphony. Audre Lorde proposes the erotic as a “source of power and information” and of deep “non-rational knowledge.” Both Carone and Lorde were quick to clarify its difference from the pornographic, which offers sensation without feeling. Instead, as Lorde states, “the erotic is a measure between the sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Unafraid of feeling, Lombard puts the easel in the line of fire, immediately capturing, transferring, and transmuting these feelings as they arise. The work, again, to reference Lorde, is an act of love born of chaos and finding itself in creative harmony, the erotic as a bridge between the spiritual and the political.

“Late Spring Storms, Ashokan,” Crayon on Paper, 22” x 30”, 2023

These paintings call us to return to our bodies, to our innate truth, that we are connected to and part of nature. With the rise of AI and environmental collapse, we are tempted to turn off; we are seduced by algorithms that work to placate our every desire while creating increasing dissonance between the physical, lived experience and cyberspace swiping and clicking. It is hard to live in our bodies, and maybe we won’t even need them anymore. This shift away from embodied experience toward the visual and mental saps us of our inherent erotic power, a truth that must be felt to be understood, it resists codification and commodification. Our bodies are complicated, at times fragile, uncomfortable, messy, beautiful, and grotesque; regardless, they will fail. They were designed that way.

We have only this fleeting existence; Lombard’s works present an alternative accounting of experience and offer a methodology of resistance. Nature finds its expression in and through Lombard as they howl together from the mountaintop. It is a call and a cry to reconnect with our bodies, to attend to the natural world and one another. In the final year of her life, as Lombard lost her ability to handle paint, drawing remained a critical outlet. In her last work, In Awe, the artist's space is in the bottom left again, with wild and energetic forces closing in.

“In Awe,” Crayon on paper, 22” x 30”, 2023

The work is best appreciated in person. Stand before them, listen, and allow these paintings to challenge and disrupt our rational, largely intellectual approach to life and art. This is a different upset than a banana taped to a wall, as the works are not without form or logic but rather a fusion, a dynamic balance of these states of being, a physically grounded spirituality, evidenced by the weight and felt presence of the once living body. There was no separation between Lynette as an artist, an educator, and a lover of people and the natural world. She brought a furious love to all these things, and we who knew her remain in awe and gratitude for her life, work, and legacy. Lynette Lombard died on November 8, 2023, from complications of glioblastoma cancer. WM