Videos + Essays 

Lynda Lowe: What Meets the Eye,  by Margaret Hawkins, 2010

I was drawn to Lynda Lowe’s work the first time I saw it. I liked the way it refused to fit into any category, amalgamating nature painting, abstraction and still life into one, and the way it vibrated with energy yet held still at its core. Later during a Ragdale residency I got to see work in progress, and I was drawn in further, but the mystery, the nut of the work only began to open to me when I visited Lowe’s studio, on an island outside Seattle, Washington, seven months later. Or more exactly the Eureka moment came not in the studio but on the road later that day when, as we returned from a trip to explore a strip of ocean coastline, Lowe began to recite verbatim from Chapter Two of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard’s book-length essay on nature and seeing. This passage, delivered as the artist navigated a four-wheel drive vehicle through twisty mountain roads, begins with a recollection of Dillard’s childhood game of hiding pennies so that a stranger might later find them and receive “a free gift from the universe.” It ends as follows:

“If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”

Lowe may have been quoting Dillard that day but she was talking about herself. This attention to detail, this scheming to cause others to pay attention, this act of planting a small treasure for the purpose of dislodging joy from the pattern of the commonplace so that some future wayfarer, some observant stranger, might come across it and be pleased, this fanatical curiosity, this addiction to observation paired with a generosity of spirit that makes the possessor of joy wish to pass it along to another like-minded soul, this sense of the spiritual in the everyday, is, of course, exactly what Lowe is all about.

Lowe’s lush paintings of natural objects begin, surprisingly, not in nature but in language, that engine of thought. Her orderly observations of the physical world come not from a desire to imitate its appearance but from a need to trace it back to its inchoate origins.

Lowe’s queries thus range toward physics and metaphysics. If most painters think about their work in relation to other artists’, Lowe cites Hegel, Newton, Galileo, Rilke and T.S. Eliot as her inspiration. The bookshelves in her studio contain more science, philosophy and poetry – including well-thumbed and annotated copies of The Illustrated Richard Feynman and David Abram’s “The Spell of the Sensuous”– than they do art history. In particular, Lowe is interested in the experience of perception. She wants to know what it means to see, maybe because she takes so much pleasure in it. Her paintings are an ongoing investigation into the phenomenon that Abram describes as “the reversibility of subject and object”. This idea, that “the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff,” holds that seeing is not an act by a conscious being on an inert object but an exchange between consciousnesses, an assumption which, when accepted literally, is radically transforming. It suggests a vibrantly alive universe in which every thing, every being, every molecule is inter-reactive. It says that we change a thing simply by observing it, or in Lowe’s case, by painting it, and that it changes us.

So it is that Lowe’s paintings of simple things, like leaves and birds, sticks and stones, plumb bobs and tea bowls, leave us thinking about what she calls the “fluid acts of giving and receiving,” about the seamless nature of time and space and about how matter comes into existence.

Though not at first. What the newcomer to Lowe’s work encounters first is beauty. Peter Schjeldahl has said that beauty is an event that happens to an object. Lowe orchestrates this event. She does it to arrest our attention, to make us see beauty in simple things, and thus slow our attention. That’s what beauty can do. It makes us linger. Once we get used to it, once its dramatic, harmonizing effects on the body subside, we find ourselves broken open a little and into that broken space ideas about perception can sift up from below, slowly, from the stillness of the work.

This stepped, layered response to Lowe’s paintings mimics how they are made, except in reverse. We enter the paintings at their endpoint. Their highly polished surfaces draw us in and down, as if into a well or a mine. We have the sensation of submersion, of diving or falling into them, excavating through their hard polish to get to increasingly soft layers below.

In order, here is what we see as we descend. First, on top, float highly realistic, painstakingly rendered bits of the natural and mechanical world. Flowers, leaves, birds, calipers, Japanese ink brushes, tea bowls – each object is precious and perfect; we want to linger here. But after awhile this layer gives way to the space below or behind it and opens out into pools of deeply luminescent color. Our eyes swim in deep all-color blacks, in Chinese red or hot ocean blue. From these seas of color we continue to travel though space and, eventually, if we look long enough we reach an airier place where bits and scraps of mostly undecipherable text seem to whisper to us. We don’t always know the language they speak but we sense their meaning: beneath all this beauty is reason. Then we notice an even fainter sound or sign. Around the edges and incised deep into the surface of these painted panels are obscured symbols and ciphers, equations, plans, diagrams. There, underneath everything else, is design. We just can’t know it.

The sensation of traveling through this palimpsest of information is like peering through a murky medium, say pond water or fog, to successively deeper layers of meaning. It takes time, and by taking time it makes us think about time. It makes us think about the time it takes to make a painting of a flower for instance, or the time it takes to make the universe or, more to the point, the time it takes the universe to make a perfect flower.

And there, half-submerged, is Lowe’s truth, like some strange and half-visible life form creeping across the ocean floor. From the formless soup of universal possibility, she tells us, emerges the astounding beauty of the gorgeous particular. A yellow magnolia blossom. A pomegranate. A leaf.

This deeply satisfying conclusion is not accomplished so much through Lowe’s scholarly approach to ideas as it is through the more visceral medium of paint. Whether she intends it or not, Lowe’s work speaks most deeply on a sensual and personal level. Its power comes not only from its considerable beauty and intelligence but from the tension we feel between the artist’s maddeningly specific perfectionism and her eleventh-hour surrender to the wild messiness of the cosmos. We sense a very personal and poignant war here, one in which the spontaneous comet-like brushstroke added at the end of a painting over a trompe-l’oeil rendering of a yellow magnolia blossom acknowledges a world of struggle in which order competes with chaos, control with accident, West with East, and noise with stillness. This final paradox gives the work an extra twist of complexity that makes it as psychologically compelling as it is philosophically so.

Finally, of course, Lowe’s effort to control even the meta-universe that is a painting cannot hold. Just as she has transformed and been transformed by what she has observed, so we the viewer transform it again by viewing it. It spins out of control and what we see is always and forever different from what she painted. But Lowe’s paintings mark an ambitious and unique moment of creation. She spins specificity out of infinity and by doing so dares us all to go backwards to the beginning.

Margaret Hawkins is a Chicago-area writer, critic and curator. Her work appears in the Chicago Sun-Times, ARTnews, New Art Examiner, and a number of other national and international publications. She teaches Art History, Theory and Criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the author of several books including: Lydia’s Party, A Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Survive a Natural Disaster.