Artist’s Statement

I lie on my back and gaze up at the light filtering through the leaves. The wind teases through the canopy; the mouldy smell of crushed leaves greets my nose in warm waves. Ahh, bliss. But it is not enough. Like the Inuit who whistle down the Northern Lights, I need to bring it all closer, to see it more clearly, to run it through my processor. And so, I paint.

   The relationship to place is a fundamental human experience.I believe that place is intrinsic to who we are, part of our collective identity. To varying degrees, we each have an intimate relationship to the natural environment that is essential to our well-being; we are of nature and we lay down roots. My paintings are a response to the spaces I have lived in and the elemental rhythms of a changing landscape that inhabit and nourish my imagination. With an energetic brush, I mean to celebrate the energy and life-force of nature and evoke metaphors for states of mind.Light and colour are my passions and remain the driving force behind my paintings. Over the years, my body of work has grown to include around 400 paintings and I have internalised a rich vocabulary of signs and symbols. Although my past work is not strictly figurative, I have largely felt tied to serve what I see: the specific subject matter at hand. Recently, compelled to free myself from this constraint, I have elected to throw out my old rules in favour of ‘what if’. A major shift in my approach toward familiar themes has resulted in some new and different artworks beginning most notably with ‘River Reflections’ 2005, a large-scale oil which appears like a landscape on fire.

Lynda Bruce
2008