Frederick Lynch

Painting is primarily about the sensations produced when a fairly flexible material is applied to a somewhat inert material. Painting is about paint, about its color, light and surface, evolving into subject matter, form and content.

My paintings, consisting of alternating bars of color, are basically presentations of light, texture, and pattern, with suggestions of implied space and vaguely familiar structures. They are also about repetition, sequence, variation and the nuances of a series approach. Just ahead of these concerns is a high regard for the paint itself, fluid, viscous, gelatinous, almost voluptuous. Although more often pressed into the service of representation, paint retains its own character. Whether crystalline or creamy, skin-tight or flaky, the substance of paint has a life of its own, with rich metaphorical possibilities, independent of illusion and description.

Paint is the subject, if not the form, in some abstract paintings. In my paintings, though, it is an integral means to a more compelling end. The various bars of color, usually interspersed with similar widths of more neutral tints and whites, represent for me the infinite, astonishing variations that the stripe contains. These possibilities include scale and proportion systems, geometrical and mathematical configurations, and reflections on ideal shape and format.

The stripe has been part of me since my undergraduate days at Massachusetts College of Art. As a figurative painter, I saw the stripe motif as a useful decorative device. Much of my work then dealt with clothing, worn as façade and front. To this end, intense, multi-chromatic stripe patterns presented the viewer with form and content simultaneously, decorating and deriding the figure with the same idiom. This (the 60’s) was the age of the double-knit suit, day-glow colors, and bell-bottoms.

Eventually, the stripe became a significant aid in describing form alone, for implying contoured planes, and as a way of contradicting expected illusion. The social context became more ambiguous, the figure gradually giving way to forms more abstract and mechanical. The paintings done at this time (70’s and early 80’s) were of things, not people. They were about forms that clashed, as nature and civilized elements often do. The stripe became flatter, simpler, more emblematic rather than descriptive.