Visually Celebrating a Passion for Nature
Meet Lynne Adams
At 8 years of age, I was the youngest female to complete an Outward Bound course in the United States. I also grew up within walking distance of Walden Pond, and spent a great deal of time walking trails created by Henry David Thoreau.
This was the grounding of my intense love of the woods and nature. As an adult, I found a way to visually celebrate my passion for nature. I choose to live and work in Western Massachusetts because of its rich variety of landscapes and constant inspiration.
I was a “plein air” (the French term for “in open air”) artist for the first half of my painting career. I loved being part of this 200 year tradition, capturing the fleeting moments of the landscape. Being outside in the elements was exhilarating. The challenges were the bugs, wind, rain, snow, moving sun, moving water, and moving clouds. But it was important to me to really feel the land.
I have always been drawn to atmosphere, extremes in weather, patterns, rhythms, and light in nature. The work should be moving and alive like nature, I want the viewer to keep noticing new things in the painting, similar to the different moments you experience on a walk outside. There is a whole symphony of voices in nature and I am blessed to play conductor and choose which voices to have playing in my compositions.
My best work is when the paintings feel ‘natural’, as if nature had created the painting itself with very little assistance from me.
I am now primarily a studio painter. I still paint outdoors to keep in touch with “reality”, but I work mainly in my studio, where I feel more liberated to experiment with each image that I work on.
I now have the best of both worlds; I have the knowledge of what happens in nature with light, color, and atmosphere, but because I’m not racing to capture it before it’s gone, I have freedom to play.
