Reviews

Lynda Lowe paints poetic worlds as weightless as dreams, in which unlikely objects have somehow drifted together. A leaf, a bird, an earthenware vessel, aging scientific texts, trees, and insects – all rendered with exquisite detail – come to rest on misty, densely layered grounds. Although her objects sometimes look real enough to grasp, they ultimately prove elusive.

Two large, unstretched canvases dominated this show. “F/Light” (2005) contains several of Lowe’s signature elements – green leaves, an unadorned bowl, and hints of a landscape reduced almost to abstraction. The leaves float at the very front of the painting, hovering before the luxurious atmosphere. Painterly veils of color simultaneously recede into the depths of the canvas and create a luminous surface, while barely perceptible scribblings of words and diagrams intensify the hazy reverie, which is pierced by a horizontal bolt of blue.

Meaning dwells deep within these puzzles, accessible, in the best of the paintings, by unpredictable routes. In “F/Light”, for example, echoes resonate between the curve of a bowl and the cascade of falling leaves; between the vaporous background and the brushy ledge, between the unfettered strokes of paint an the more regimented text. Gradually the interplay among these elements coalesces to reveal harmonies often overlooked.

F/Light 61”H x 64”W

The Boston Globe
May 2002
Arden Gallery Exhibition, Boston, MA
Reviewed by: Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

Imagining reality
Lynda Lowe parses perception, and the variety of scaffolds for making sense and making meaning, in her show at the Arden Gallery. Her technique grounds the esoteric nature of her subject matter. Lowe starts with hollow-core doors; she paints them with an undercoat of homemade gesso, then adds a luminous veneer of watercolor. She paints details, such as a leaf or bird's wing, in oil paint, then finishes with a cold wax, which makes each piece appear crafted from colored marble.

With this thorough and refined process, she depicts images, diagrams, text, and passages of color that suggest different ways of knowing. In one series, she builds the shape of an open book onto the surface of each panel, denoting a gateway to knowledge. In "Book of Commons: 8" that tome appears to be opening from a stone slab engraved with illegible text. Lowe scratches grids onto each page of the book, as well as a diagram of an ellipse and images of a leaf and thorny stalks. This and other pieces suggest that knowledge is ephemeral, that it acts merely as a starting point leading to deeper mysteries, or as a framework from which to plumb the imagination. Lowe's paintings hover in a variety of prisms of reality: what we see, remember, and imagine. The irony is that they are exquisitely real themselves: paint, wax, and wood.

THE Magazine
July, 2001
Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Reviewed by Richard Tobin

Lynda Lowe’s work exhibit at Peyton Wright featured a series of mixed media panels combining text and images in variations on a central theme. They address the artist’s fascination with the “inexplicable revelations that familiar objects like a smooth pebble, a forged wrench, or a leaf beside the pathway can summon.” That sentiment is encrypted for the artist in the phrase “by a grace of sense” from the poem by T. S. Eliot entitled “Burnt Norton”: “The inner freedom from the practical desire / The release from action and suffering, release from the inner / and the outer compulsion, yet surrounded/ By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving…” Each panel is a collage of images of natural and man-made objects assembled under the various guises in which we experience them – as observed image, mechanical drawing, mathematical formula, or descriptive entry from a scientific journal. The very handsome visual effects of the panels produced by the artist’s painstaking craft and elegant sense of design create an almost seamless blend with the gallery’s adjacent exhibits of antiquities and vintage implements.

Taken together, the panels evoke a treasured scrapbook of pages salvaged from some edition of French philosophe Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie, that vastly ambitious 18th-century compendium of all human knowledge whose 28 volumes – 11 of them books of plates and illustrations – were the capstone of all Enlightenment rationalism, not to mention a catalyst of the French Revolution. Lowe’s artful pastiche of mechanical artifact and geometric construct, vestiges of Renaissance and later European thought and technology, is an hommage to science’s capacity to transform sensate experience into mediations on time and space. Lowe’s process probes the sensate world to divine the presence of the mysterious in the ordinary. Hence the affinity with Eliot’s “grace of sense” in Burnt Norton; Eliot’s own point of departure is the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Herakleitos, whose cosmology of the four elements of fire, air, water and earth was built upon the insight that “everything is in flux.” For Eliot, the seeing prison of present time and space reveals in the song of the thrush or “the dust on a bowl of rose leaves,” an eternal meshing of time past, future, and present. Lowe’s panels shift between different modes of perception in an attempt to fix the objects “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless/ Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, / but neither arrest nor movement.””

Chicago Reader
Gwenda/Jay Addington Gallery, Chicago, IL
November 2001
Reviewed by Fred Camper

Metaphors of exploration and discovery describe an encounter with great art in John Keat's 1816 sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer": he says he "felt like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken." But thinkers and artists of the past century have questioned the notion of "truth," making doubt rather than certainty our principal artistic paradigm.

Lynda Lowe's ten paintings at Gwenda Jay/Addington simultaneously offer the precision of scientific knowledge and the romance of un-nameable moods and emotions, fanciful imagery, and evocative symbolism. Dense with scientific diagrams, written texts, and carefully limned images of birds or simple mechanisms, they resemble the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (and Lowe told me she included one text by Galileo). Painted on wood panel with additional insets bearing individual images – her works recall scientific illustration, giving the objects depicted a stunning physicality. The drawings and texts (many not in English) suggest secret knowledge or the indecipherable writing of some lost civilization.

The 80-inch-wide Release shows a bone, a seashell, a sprouting seed, a landscape. Between these images are variable color fields punctuated by incised geometric diagrams and a spiral based on Fibonacci numbers, a series evident in growth patterns in nature. Some images have private meanings: Lowe, who's traveled in Tibet, says that a bird's wing attached to a bowl is "a reference to vessels put on altars as offerings in monasteries." The wing "expresses the notion of letting the offering go."

Each painting sets up a powerful tension between analysis and flights of fancy. One of the inset panels in Release shows six speckled eggs painted in such detail they seem palpable. Above them a rectangular view of an indistinct landscape – perhaps a field or a body of water – below an orange sky functions as a kind of window beckoning the viewer towards an unknown beyond. Long interested in Jungian archetypes, Lowe says that the egg is a symbol of fertility and potential, and the horizon a potent symbol of the future, "while land suggests both the present and the past."

When Lowe read Leonard Shlain's Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light . His insights impressed and led her to other readings that also made her want to incorporate scientific drawings in her art. Her approach is associative and poetic, however, rather than analytical" "Science and art share the same investigative process, questioning, being on the edge of the frontier of what is known and unknown, what is knowable and what is not knowable."

Book of Commons: Be Still is one of a series of paintings that Lowe did for her last show (more can be seen at www.lyndalowe.com). A single inset takes the shape of a book, its sides angled out slightly from the picture plane. The left "page" shows geometric diagrams and a pendulum, the right a flowering plant. While any of these images might be used as an illustration in a book, the loose relationship each image has with the others contrasts with one's expectations for repositories of knowledge. And together the two pages suggest that science and art have a symbolic relationship: poetic objects are enhanced by science's precision while science itself can be allusive, poetic, uncertain.

ArtScope.net
May 2000
Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago, IL
Reviewed by G. Jurek Polanski

"In Congruity," the current exhibition at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago, is an offering of new mixed media paintings on wood by Lynda Lowe. It is as much a celebration of human curiosity, ingenuity and discovery as it is a visual pleasure. "In Congruity" will intrigue and challenge through May 27, 2000.

"Something unknown is doing we don't know what." That declaration by physicist, Arthur Stanley Eddington, sums much of the reality behind the equations and conjectures of Quantum physics. Light, as just one example, behaves as a wave... or a particle, a quantum -- it all depends upon the expectation, the observational approach. In a similar way, the facts and theories of science, and the Truths of the Arts, like the Truths of religious insight, are complementary views of a unity... and we require both. Lynda Lowe's art does not so much employ or embody the scientific phenomena and facts, as it views and contemplates, iconifies them aesthetically. Her themes are not science as applied in or to art, nor scientific illustration, nor even specific disciplines in themselves. They are a rare genre -- the artist contemplating the human soul as fabricating its science; a science which at times seduces the soul to deny itself. Her art assumes mind and soul form a duality of one: they are "In Congruity."

It is surprising how, until the 1960s, so many great thinkers, and particularly physicists, were also well-versed in literature, philosophy, art and, especially, music. They acknowledged their humanity, and it may well shed some light on their own creativity in the sciences. Since the Eighteenth century, it has been far rarer that artists were truly aware of, much less amenable to the sciences. Physicist Arthur Stanley Eddington, in his essay "Mind Stuff" mused on "the generation and maintenance of waves against viscosity, by suitable forces applied to the surface," (he gave complex equations); and his thoughts wandered to "There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter/ And lit by the rich skies...," (Eddington quotes in length). (In Quantum Questions, New Science Library: 1984). This is a central pulse to Lynda Lowe's art. And it is important and moving for the reasons Eddington himself declared: "It is because the mind, the weaver of illusion, is also the only guarantor of reality that reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion. Illusion is to reality as the smoke is to fire." Particle and wave, Flesh and Spirit, science and art -- "In Congruity."

Lynda Lowe's exhibition at the Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery offers an early panel, one of the beginnings to her "Origin" series of paintings. Appropriately, it is entitled Big Bang. In this work, there is still a sense of concept realized in image, a direct correspondence between cosmology and an artist's conception. It is nonetheless a stimulating, visually engaging work. This exhibition at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery also includes Origin: Gravity (18"x24": Mixed Media), which reveals a further level of insight. In this work, Lowe does not just envision, but expands and investigates the process of what the resulting vision is, and how one comes to envision. This is not just a playing with image. Albert Einstein himself firstly saw visions and only then sought their notation -- and he once noted: "God is subtle; He is not malicious." In an excellent preface to the NIU Art Museum catalogue for Lowe's 1999 exhibition, "Form and Measure," artist and art critic Ann Wiens noted: "...the questioning and problem-solving processes are more intriguing to her than the ultimate results of the quest." It is what makes us human; artists and scientists alike.

Themes in Lowe's art, as in nature, mutate and reappear in alternative guises. Book of Commons #1 (18"x24": watercolor/oil on wood), the first in her new series, reveals a plumb bob (upper right) juxtaposed with bird wing schematics (at left). It is the artist who intuits the necessary contrast, and the congruity: an act, to be an act, must rely on an opposing ground. The gravity which draws the plumb bob true, is the very force which enables flight. The motif here was presaged in Momentum and Gravity (1999).

In Lynda Lowe's art, the formal qualities of composition and technique, seem so natural to an immediate impression -- they move a viewer and the very intensity of the artist's own interest contributes to the enduring interest of her work. Lowe noted at the opening of this exhibition that the book holds a particular pride of place in the formulation and transmission of discovery and belief. It has for centuries allowed men to recall and know, to speak beyond their own time to the future. Lowe's Book of Commons series, showcased in the Gwenda Jay/Addington exhibition, reverberates to that transmission. The paintings in the Book of Commons set echo the codex format as a means of framing image, and of contrasting harmonies of motif, and the artist develops the theme as a flexible, platonic ideal. This visual trope takes imaginative flight in pieces such as the watercolor/oil on wood, Book of Commons #5 (18"x24"), which confronts the viewer with a double spine and a doubled, split panel at right, balanced against a sign, numbers, at left. In Book of Commons #7 (18"x24") the book simulacrum is rotated by ninety degrees, and here, in its visual elements, contrasts are postulated and resolved. A viewer notes the maple seed at lower left; two pebbles at the top of an inner panel, and a lone helix crowned with an arrow -- a directionality implicit in living matter -- and these stand in seeming contrast to the five inert but ordered pebbles at lower right. Lowe at times extends the book's linear enclosure of content to a broader approach. In works such as Form and Measurement #2 (26"x36") objects of calibration and measure are contained within square contours; segregated from the ground panel which itself bears at lower right a triple bar ensemble similar to map codes: bar codes in surveyor's units. In Extremis (36"x28") a drilled rock pendant is suspended from beyond the image's uppermost boundary by a cord marked in black and yellow units of length. It hovers quiescent above a branch of thorns which rises four rows of stones, arranged from four rocks in the upper line down to five small pebbles in the lowest. To the right of these is a small, unitized bar line. Lowe noted at the opening that in such pieces, the initial image seemed too condensed and compact; but the effect of embedding the smaller panels is to transform them into apparent incidences within a greater totality. It gives the sense that science, like art, ever draws out and constrains that which has infinite extension and potential. And in As with wave and quantum particle in light phenomenon, they contrast and at the same time harmonize matter, animate and inanimate. What eludes the materiality is precisely what informs the artist's intimations, and, upon close reflection, it is what constitutes the grounding for science, art, and all that is uniquely human.

Some art lovers will, perhaps exceptionally, recognize in Lowe's paintings old friends from the history of science and human accomplishment. In Book of Commons #10 (18"x24") one notes at lower left Descartes's Vortices of Force -- his speculation of 1744 as to the fundamental structures that frame the universe; and these are linked at upper left with a white circle interlinked with red triangle, while at lower right a wishbone is evident. Three pebbles at upper right complete the panel. Always, in life and non-life, man perceives (as Plato thought), or imagines (as per Aristotle), structures, archetypes, underlying rationales. In genetics, as in Chaos theory, and cosmologies, nothing is truly random... dissimilarities, apparent incongruities, small unrelated seeds evolve and resolve into wholes not summed by their parts and into ordered complexities, symmetric or not. Descarte (in math), Einstein (in physics), Crick and Watson (DNA), Kukele (the bonded ring of hydrocarbon chemistry)... all thought in images; the math and diagrams came as afterthought. There is a poetry in such intuitions, imagings. Lynda Lowe's paintings, the artist's informed inspiration, reveal that it is also the stuff of art.

Viewer's needn't be conversant with science or philosophy; in fact, that might even distract from a deep surrender to Lowe's real inspiration. In a work such as Book of Commons #11 (18"x24"), the knowledgeable may indeed recognize her incorporations from Galileo's The Siderial Messenger of 1610, in which Galileo announced the moon's of Jupiter, dethroning the earth's believed unique status; and in which he also ferreted out the rings of Saturn. But Galileo at first doubted his eyes: and then, glance by glance, connected two apparent and unholy satellites into that planet's singular ring. It is the ability to perceive, not the resulting data, that Book of Commons #11 finds as its theme; an inspiration made more explicit by the germs of life -- acorns, maple seed, red beans -- which counterpoint the Galilean florescence of mind. In Book of Commons #11, Saturn bears rings; seeds sport wings, and both reveal a growth toward form. Lynda Lowe displays a meditative and romantic art, born of an uncommon meditation.

Perpetuum (36"x28"), another watercolor and oil on wood, confirms that Lynda Lowe's art does not draw inspiration solely from hard science: her sense of wonder and empathy ranges through the humane and social. In Perpetuum, a viewer first discerns abstract writing forms (there is a source), and then alien, but recognizable characters of script. There is a progression... from the concept of marks, marks linked to meaning, to alphabets. It is both a conceptual leap (and needn't have occurred, as shown by many pictographic and ideographic writings of the world); and the result of visual play and curiosity. The child begins in taking note of all about it; the artist sustains that child-like need to see, investigate, explore... to develop and become. Lynda Lowe noted that the writing forms incised into her panel originated with Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel, a teacher-philosopher who believed all learning should be extracted from nature and observation; that it should challenge the mind. Pestalozzi did this in practice; Froebel articulated it in such books as The Education of Man (A.M.Kelly: 1974 reprint of 1900 Edition). Among other things, Froebel devised his characters as a challenge to teach children writing, as something to be investigated, much like children would investigate the snail spiral below these markings or the longhorn beetle at the bottom of Perpetuum. (Froebel's methods nurtured the children: Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky...). In Lynda Lowe's art, one needn't know the well-springs; the paintings offer the essentials, in forms and archetypes, in harmonies... in their congruities. In the 1999 NIU Art Museum catalogue to Lowe's "Form and Measure" exhibit, artist and critic, Ann Wiens, concluded: "Lynda Lowe's paintings are explorations of the points at which processes of artistic and scientific investigation merge." Wiens also summarized the import of Lowe's poetic image: "Without intuition and subjectivity, science is doomed to repeat itself indefinitely, to stagnate. Art without the deliberate. focused pursuit of an intellectually defined concept will suffer the same fate." Scientists have noted that as well as artists:

Little by little we subtract Faith and fallacy from fact, The illusory from the true And then starve upon the residue. Samuel Hoffenstein, In Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline, (Oxford University Press: 1980)

Lynda Lowe's art rediscovers faith by unveiling part of the fallacy of isolated fact: her art emerges in that congruity -- Eddington's assertion that "reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion": her art is curative. Physicist Erwin Schroedinger, in his "Why Not Talk Physics?" once observed: "Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears." And Eddington pointed out that science can explain the joke, but it cannot make you laugh. (Both in Quantum Questions, New Science Library: 1984)

"In Congruity" is the stalking of strange footprints, and together, the paintings gather a reflective image of their musical, laughing, artistic... inquiring and creative source. It is a scientist who caught the profound insight:

"We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories. one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own." Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) physicist In Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline, mathematician.

"In Congruity," the current exhibition of art by Lynda Lowe offers twelve celebrations of human curiosity, ingenuity and discovery -- human spirit captured in paint on wood -- a visual pleasure. "In Congruity" now at Gwenda Jay/Addington Gallery, Chicago, runs through May 27, 2000. The gallery's website is http://www.gwendajay.com

--G. Jurek Polanski

Daily Chronicle
Northern Illinois Museum, DeKalb, IL and University Gallery, Chicago, IL
April 2000
Reviewed by Ben Mahmoud

At one time, it was felt all of human knowledge could be contained in a collection of a few volumes, and that idea gave rise to the development of the encyclopedia. Later, during the Renaissance, there were only a few individuals who could encompass knowledge of many fields. In our time, knowledge is far too vast and complex for any one person to have a deep grasp of several fields. The body of contemporary knowledge is not just vast and complex, it is of different kinds. This has given rise to the idea of "multiple intelligences."

Some writers have simplified this notion of multiple intelligences to descriptions of right/left brain activity. Indeed, we know that certain skills and perceptual abilities arise from one hemisphere of the brain, while other proficiencies come from the opposite hemisphere. Common wisdom suggests that creativity and art comes from the right hemisphere of the brain, while language and analysis comes from the left. But it is not quite so simple.

There are artists working today that wish to bring various and diverse intelligences to bear on their work. They wish to meld right brain and left brain activity into unified works of art. Lynda Lowe is such an artist. The work of this accomplished artist is being shown at the Olson Gallery in the School of Art at Northern Illinois University. This exhibition has been shown in the School of Art Gallery in Chicago, and, now, has been brought to DeKalb. My initial encounter with Lowe's work left me with the feeling that there was something hauntingly familiar about it.

Lowe's work brings together images, diagrams, scripts and formulae. These elements become compositional features that are put together in a seemingly arbitrary manner. That is to say, she intuitively decides where a block of script, an arc, a diagram or an image will be placed. She also uses intuitive processes to determine some colorations and tonalities. But most of the elements she uses, such as the look of a fruit or measuring tool, do not appear to be intuitive or arbitrary, though the choice of that object might be intuitive.

The geometric structures and formulae that she places in her work certainly do not have the look of arbitrary things. So there is, at the outset, the visual connection of qualities that seem empirical and intuitive, or, if you will, left brain/right brain. Lowe apparently has a keen interest in matters scientific; and she also has a deep interest in a rich, intuitive reaction to the world about her. These rational and intuitive aspects are brought together in her paintings. While the emotional observer, and the scientific analyzer have different intelligences or use different cranial hemispheres, they are, finally, both human. It is a desire to unify the different aspects of our mental functions that seems to be the fundamental impetus for Lowe's work.

There is that haunting familiarity about Lowe's work. The hard-to-ignore feeling that this has been seen before will not go away. Then, it hits. Of course! Leonardo DaVinci. DaVinci's sketchbooks have the very same coordination of image, script and geometric figures. Recalled are his famous drawings embedded in blocks of notations and formulae. While we do not find in DaVinci's sketchbooks the colorations that Lowe uses, the appearance is very similar.

DaVinci was the definitive Renaissance man. He was the most noted person of that era that brought together what we would call artistic and scientific interests. Some have suggested DaVinci was really a scientist acting like an artist because it was much easier to earn a living in his day as an artist. (As an aside, this might cause one to wonder how many artists today are acting like scientists because it is easier to earn a living in the sciences.) But DaVinci does not entirely explain the aura of deja vu about Lowe's work.

There was, in the '60s, a Swiss artist named Hans Erni who worked much in the manner of Lowe. Erni would combine Renaissance-like renderings of the human figure with areas of mathematical notations, formulae and scientific chartings. In a short time, Erni's work was being used as adverting by several companies whose products were based on a scientific enterprise, such as drug companies. This commercialization of his work brought an end to serious interest in his painting. It became obvious how well the work of Erni integrated into the needs of the advertising page, and may, in fact, have depended on the aesthetics of the advertising page. And this brings me back to Lowes' work.

Once "in" the work, other, and more important, aspects emerge. ,Lowe's work is about signs. In fact, each of her works is an essay on signs. There are many different kinds of signage present. A carefully drawn and colored bird is simply one form of sign. It is not a bird, but when viewed, we become aware of a bird. The representational (some would say, "realistic") sign of the bird suggests a reality outside of the painting: the real bird. A block of text is another kind of sign. Marks and recurring forms are read, and this refers us to meanings outside of the marks themselves. Diagrams of a geometrical form present an altogether different kind of sign.

The geometrical form represented by the diagram may or may not exist in the physical world, but the viewer of the diagram is referred to a reality, a space or realm, beyond the painted surface where such a form can exist. When we encounter a mathematical formulae, this clearly does not exist in the physical world. It exists only as an idea, and we know it by the signs we make to signify the meanings we intend. Such signs, drawn by the artist, point us to that realm of thought where pure and elegant symmetry can exist.

Finally, these paintings reveal Lowe's fundamental interest is in signs. These signs suggest an array of intelligences. The manner in which the various signs and the intelligences that rule their respective realms are brought together suggests an artist of deep curiosity and highly competent means intent on creating a unity from this diversity. This is an elegant and thought-provoking exhibition. It should be viewed during its stay.