Interview

Adapted from interviews conducted at Lynda Lowe’s studio, November 2008.

JM: Jane Milosch is the Senior Program Officer for the Arts, Office of the Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, and since 2004, Curator for the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has published and lectured widely on twentieth-century and contemporary art, decorative arts, and design.

LL: Lynda Lowe

JM: I’ve followed your work for over a decade, and it’s been fascinating to watch your technical skill as a painter evolve in tandem with your imagery. Your new paintings, Invisible Poem and Psi: The Uncertainty Principle are larger in scale and evoke a dynamic state that increases the feeling of vast, infinite space in your work. You’ve adeptly orchestrated the entire surface in this new body of work, especially in Form and Measure and Space Reaches From Us III. I recognize your signature palette of gold and red tones, contrasted with cool blues and greens in Path to the Path and Chado; but these colors are more intense and saturated here. Other new paintings, such as In Us are the Woods and Liber Primus, incorporate a cast plaster surface as their ground, recalling fresco painting. Using so many techniques and materials -- watercolor, oil, wax, panel, plaster -- sets up intriguing contrasts and makes your paintings feel like highly-crafted objects. I know that you’ve also had formal training in fiber and printmaking, and can see that these processes inform your skill in handling layers, surface texture, and graphic space. How do you create such tactile, painterly surfaces?

LL: My foundation surface is prepared on wood panel with a laboriously produced handmade gesso. After a lot of sanding and burnishing, diagrams and marks are incised into the white surface. I then begin to work more intuitively with paint. I add and subtract many layers of color to develop a patina that suggests time, wear, and weather. The palette is often chosen as a result of an experience I’ve had with color connected to travel, observation, and memory—the deep lacquered reds of Asian antiques, the shifting atmospheric golds of Saharan sand and sky, an old wall with stratums of paint and graffiti, or a saffron swath of fabric draped around a temple statue. I’ve just begun to experiment with casting hydrocal surfaces, but regardless of the foundation, whether wood or plaster, the final stage involves applications of layers of wax. By the time a work is finished, I’ve touched the surface hundreds of times.

JM: I can feel that sense of history in your work. I’m familiar with your renderings of mathematical formulas and scientific equations, juxtaposed with primitive, abstract marks; but this visual vocabulary has become more your own alphabet. Nature—leaves, sticks, stones—is paired with man-made things, such as vessels and tools in your paintings Form and Measure and Shape Shift. While some objects are depicted in a hyper-realistic manner, others are obscured or embedded in the surface. Can you tell me how your iconography has developed?

LL: The imagery in my work has taken some new turns. I’ve been deliberately stalking surprise by setting up circumstances where unexpected things can occur that force me to try something new. There’s a kind of daring required when you approach that edge between what you know and what you don’t. At times, especially early in the process, I deliberately allow myself to be lost and then see where it leads. Of course that doesn’t always yield something successful right away, but working on the puzzle presents clues to new approaches. Form and Measure definitely took many exploratory meanderings and those experiments led to discoveries used in other works that followed.

JM: You also incorporate plants, objects, and specimens into the work, for example in your Book of Commons Series. You mentioned your travels earlier, and how your memory of places you’ve visited informs your work, and I see your home and studio are filled with art and artifacts collected from your travels to China, Africa, Tibet, Vietnam, and other places. How else has your travel affected your work and are there any particular places that especially move you?

LL: Travel is a very important resource for my art. I can’t always tell when we’re in the midst of a trip what’s going to filter out and become embodied in the work later on. I don’t worry about that; I love experiencing something new and being jolted out of my small-world complacency.

JM: You’ve made many of these trips sitting on the back of a motorcycle, so, depending on the quality of the roads, I imagine you are sometimes really jolted into a close relationship with nature?

LL: I AM really physically jolted! My husband’s passion for motorcycle adventures has taken us to some amazing places. On one of our first trips we traveled from Lhasa Tibet over the Himalayas along the old Silk Road into Khatmandu Nepal. It was our third trip to Tibet and those experiences have had a huge impact on my work. From that place, the vessel first appeared in my paintings. I remember we were in the remote village of Shigatse visiting the beautiful Tashilhunpo Buddhist monastery there. I was looking at the altar vessels filled with water, or grain, or a shell—these humble beautiful gifts. At that time I didn’t understand their purpose. I couldn’t tell if these were offerings that someone had made, or who the recipient was meant to be. I had this profound moment of thinking that these vessels represented giving and receiving simultaneously; that they are both part of a continuous fluid act.

JM: There is a quiet stillness in your work -- a reminder to be present. I especially see it in Shoreless Tides and Path to the Path. Gertrude Stein said that “there is no there there when you get there,” I think these paintings say something more: “the there there is now.”

LL: I really like that! It describes so well what I want to achieve—to draw attention to the present moment.

JM: Some of your text fragments are like hidden messages, spoken sotto voce, barely audible as in Not Yet Spoken. Other text is more legible as in Space Reaches From Us III. This sets up a dynamic exchange between what is literal and yet not literal, what cannot be said and only expressed. You’re never illustrating a poem, or giving us a didactic lesson on a formula. Instead you take us to a place where reality and illusion are in constant interplay, raising questions about what is known and unknown. What is the significance of some of these texts?

LL: All of the text included has something to do with observation and perception. Whether it’s scientifically or poetically described, it definitely integrates the finite and the infinite, measure and mystery. I often use scientific data, like Galileo’s and Newton’s notes, as well as the mathematical formulas of more contemporary physicists. Poetry also informs the work. When I’m making some of the intuitive gestural marks and expressive strokes, what is embedded in my psyche is the poetry that I’ve read just before I begin. I really can’t plan these or they’ll become contrived. It’s difficult to explain the process because it’s not altogether conscious, but in some transformative way, the poetry enters the work, like automatic writing that’s not literal. There is a lot of interaction between words, gestural scribble, and objects that mimic script. Writing and drawing are notation and meditation in my paintings.

JM: How do you decide what to make legible and illegible?

LL: Most of my use of text is deliberately illegible, but sometimes I'll let a word stand out, or occasionally I'll want a passage of something relevant to be able to be read. In Space Reaches From Us III, the title is a line from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space. I shaped this entire poem into the disappearing image of a bird and careful examination allows you to read the poem. In two other paintings Invisible Poem and Psi: The Uncertainty Principle, I've used only fragments from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus Book 2:1 as legible text, but that poem feels very important to image's conception.

JM: Your current exhibition is also entitled, Psi: The Uncertainty Principle. Can you tell me how you came to incorporate scientific principles, mathematical formulas, and equations in your work? Did you ever study math or physics?

LL: I never formally studied math or physics in any depth, though I've always liked those subjects and continue to read them. The little embedded diagrams originated with Richard Feynman's particle collision drawings. Early on, I accurately incised some of his equations into the surface of my paintings to incorporate that hidden subatomic world that is present, but not seen. Over time, the accuracy of these diagrams wasn't as important to me as idea of tiny cause and effect occurrences. The diagrams grew into my own invented iconography, one that represents the constant buzz of information that surrounds our every experience and is beyond easy observation.

JM: It's hard to describe, but the combination of gestural and calculated marks in your paintings suggests a secret code that lays bare the wonder of the universe. I see this depth in Psi: The Uncertainty Principle. Some paintings are like chalk boards or didactic tablets, for instance Shape Shift. They seem to record critical explanations of what we see and cannot see. And, at the same time, they transport us to a meditative place. The intellect and the heart are both at work in your paintings. Is this effect deliberate or random?

LL: That's the edge of the frontier I was talking about earlier. At a certain point in art and science, and really in all things if you follow them far enough, you reach the place where concrete understanding meets boundless possibilities. The painting Psi: The Uncertainty Principle plays with this idea. Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is referenced in the title because his theory, in the most simple and poetic terms, indicates that we cannot observe something without changing it or influencing it. I believe that the exchange influences us as well. Heisenberg writes, "What we perceive is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." The way we question and observe is connected to the way we construct our reality.

JM: You animate everyday objects, images of trees, leaves, sticks, rocks, birds, shells, bowls and these take on a spiritual dimension. There is an implied ceremonial act associated with some of these objects as in the paintings Lea, Space Reaches from Us I, and Chado. Is there some mystery at work here?

LL: Chado refers to the ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony. It involves a sensory meditation between us, nature, and art. In some way everything in this universe is animate; everything has a sentient presence. When I select objects, I am most particularly looking for those that can have layered meaning and archetypal associations that connect them to the human experience. The vessel is a good example of this in Lea and Space Reaches From Us. The vessel can be a quotidian object, the daily domestic bowl for food, but it also has a numinous meaning. Almost all religions have some kind of ritual vessel. Carl Jung suggests a vessel holds the mysterious contents of our unconscious mind. And our bodies are a vessel too. We are that container of everyday events and soulish experiences. Stephen Hawkings talks about time being the shape of vessel. In thinking about time relating to a vessel, I superimposed over the image of a bowl an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton that speaks so beautifully about time. The vessel is dissolving into his repeated words "and all is always now", until all that is left is the ellipse of the rim, which represents the echo of resonant time.

JM: I find your paintbrush motifs in the new work particularly intriguing as in Always Now and Space Reaches From Us III. Are these images stand-in symbols that represent the artist?

LL: Yes, but they also symbolize the creative act that belongs to all of us.

JM: As I look out the windows of your studio, aside from the beautiful bay on Puget Sound, the sky, and mountains in the distance, I'm also admiring the lush garden that surrounds the studio. Now that it's autumn, the contrasts of the foliage—shape, color, texture—are at their peak with wonderful shades of red, burnt ochres, and evergreens. Your garden appears to be a continuation of your studio, or rather, is the studio a continuation of your garden? Do you take things from the garden and study them? I recognize some of the leaves and pods. Do you plant things for the purpose of something that you want to paint?

LL: Yes, I do. I love gardening and I'll plant something just because I want to paint the leaves or to see how a particular plant grows. The garden is my lab and my teacher. It isn't all beautiful of course; nature is full of chaos and death. It is the great metaphor of life cycle.

JM: Yesterday we took a beautiful walk around your island, and we talked about the recent death of your mother. This has obviously left a profound mark on your life. It seems as if the deep reds and shifting blacks in your new painting Invisible Poem recall wounds and darkness. Does the idea of suffering and despair, healing and hope play a role in the mood of your recent work?

LL: Certainly the darker places in my life inform the work, which may then be given beauty as a part of it. Darkness is very closely related to light. Resilience is often forged in those darker places. I don't think beauty without this awareness has much substance. We have been talking about the idea of complementarity: darkness and light, descent and ascent, chaos and order, death and this passion we have for being alive. When these forces are taken together, they constitute a greater wholeness. Images are also capable of being simultaneously spiritual and material, light and dark, conscious and unconscious.

JM: That's what I thought about the ring symbol in your painting Invisible Poem. You've suggested both an ascent and descent. The light which illuminates the ring comes from below, not from above. Can you tell me more about the symbolism?

LL: It should be seen as a multi-layered archetype. The ellipse can be seen as a circle in dimensional space and has been used since the earliest human history to symbolize the never-ending cycle of things, eternity, and the infinite. The ring image in this painting grew out of the ellipse at the rim of the vessel and the idea of its resonant echo. It hovers in a rich darkness, as if forged in that place, and is lit by what stands beneath it.

JM: That brings me to another aspect about your work. There is a spiritual, supernatural dimension which suggests a sacred journey. Is there a more specific message, or something you hope will resonate with the viewers? Is it to encourage an awareness of another, an encounter with something outside of ourselves, a sense of belonging to something greater in the universe? I think your work does this. I think that great art does this. It helps us not to be afraid of the unknown. It tells us the there there is now.

LL: Yes, to all of the above. You and I have been talking about this all weekend. It is an important spiritual discipline to pay deep attention to what we are given in the present moment. The everyday and the sacred are not really separable. I would hope that in some way these paintings speak to that idea, to some common place, to the cycle of generous exchange in the world.