interior warmth

the still-lifes of Lynne Drexler

interior warmth

curated by Elizabeth Moss

Lynne Drexler's still-life paintings mark her transition to living full-time on Monhegan Island. "When you live here you learn to see who you really are," she said of life on the island. "You are very close to nature, and nature clarifies you to yourself. At night I feel a sense of awe in the way the black ocean stretches out to meet the black sky, and I'm aware of what it means to live in a universe."

That awareness runs through everything she painted next. The Abstract Expressionists, which is a category that includes Lynne and her earlier work, were concerned with capturing some bit of "essential truth" in monumental, all-encompassing works. They reached for the universal human experience found in our individual inner lives. Against that backdrop, Lynne's break from pure abstraction in the 1980s reads as almost avant-garde, almost courageously maverick: to turn toward domestic scenes, toward still-life, was to rebel against the highbrow art scene. Yet the resulting work carries the same weight as anything made by the Abstract Expressionists. It, too, is about what it means to be human in this world. 

In these late paintings, her objects hold weight. Flowers, ripe fruit, a bottle of liquor—they are each as much a symbol as a physical thing. A hint of vanitas runs through the work: cut flowers in their vase, fruit on the turn, a mirror with no reflection. In The Little, the vases are hemmed in by painted X's that call to mind the walls of Marie Laveau's tomb. These are the paintings of Lynne's final years (Blossom Forced was completed just two years before her death) and it is hard not to imagine that the brevity of life was on her mind.

What connects every era of her career, in the end, is not subject but her distinct, unmistakable hand with paint, and the questions that hand kept trying to answer. It is easy to mistake her choice to paint still-life–a subject long dismissed as amateur, feminine, unserious–for a smaller ambition, but Lynne asked the same of it that she asked of pure abstraction. The subject changed, but the stakes never did.

“Drexler’s ardent, cheerfully complex later paintings have not yet seen the serious attention commanded by her earlier work, yet they retain much of what made those larger paintings from the late 1950s and 60s remarkable—a struggle between control and chaos, a tension between traditional representation and free abstraction, and a juxtaposition of real life on an island and purposeful, poetic ambiguity.”

- Chris Crossman

“The thing is, it’s always been a variation on a theme (...) I’ve not changed styles so much as I have added and subtracted.”

-Lynne Drexler