Lyn Southworth - Artist Statement
About the paintings: These paintings explore the contradictions, tensions, beauty, and fragility of women’s life experiences. The subject of “The Interview”, for example, is judgment, evaluation, and criticism by others. The “Woman with Water” series is about body image issues, showing skin versus showing self, and connecting with nature in a world culture that downplays the need for either sex to be natural.
The paintings reflect my passion and concern for women as they pass through the external stages of life -- puberty, marriage, work, motherhood, and ageing -- and in the often contradictory accumulation of words, expectations, and roles that shape women from the inside, like geologic fault lines pulling and pushing below the surface. In my view, women are pictured everywhere yet visible almost nowhere, ever-present as stereotypes and never present as thinking, feeling, truly human beings. I am motivated to paint these pictures to bring that condition into balance.
Currently, my paintings are built around photographs I have taken, or from media images. At each stage of painting, I'm open to opportunities to suggest ambiguity, transparency, and anything in women’s lives which is under ordinary conditions unavailable and unexpressed.
My lifelong passion for working with textiles, and my love of Japanese art, particularly woodblock prints, shows up in the paint textures, paint carving in some pieces, and flattening of picture planes.
Are they portraits? Often people who see the paintings refer to them as portraits. Since I never have a particular person in mind when painting, even when the original photograph is of someone I have met, this description doesn't resonate with me, but “to each his own”. Once a painting is finished, I am content for it to be called whatever works in the world outside the studio.
About me: My career in art was sparked by the study of Japanese language and calligraphy. I continue to refer to the simplicity and emotional intensity of the Japanese aesthetic to center my work.
Born in Virginia, I currently reside in Southern California.
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images of women