Lynda McIntyre

Lynda Reeves McIntyre was trained as a painter and a dancer at the University of Massachusetts, Hunter College and Yale University. She holds a Doctorate in Aesthetics and weaves her training in painting, dance, Buddhist study and aesthetics into her work. She had her first major show in New York at 21 and presently exhibits throughout the U.S, Europe and the Pacific Rim. Her works are held in corporate and private collections in the U.S, Europe and Australia. She has received numerous awards including those from the NEA, the MacDowell Foundation, the JFK Center, the ICCE, the VCCA, the Getty Foundation, and various Councils for the Arts, and others.   She has been awarded art fellowships to Australia, the former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, New Zealand, Bhutan, Italy and France. She Professor Emeritus in Studio Art Professor and formerly the Chairman of the University of Vermont Department of Art and Art History.

McIntyre’s acrylic and watercolor works find their sources in personal, visceral and visual experiences. She often works outside, backpacking to sites in all weather conditions, taking notes from ocean, desert, and mountain and built environments. Many of her newer works find their inspiration in the sensuous liquidity of the sea, surfacing toward the sun, toward “the light,” arising beneath a wash of azure.  Some paintings are poured onto canvas and cotton and worked with one’s hands as if swimming or dancing in the sea. Other recent works examine the changing dynamic tension between air, raw pigment, sea and sky whether it be raw craggy cliffs clawing at a viciously blue desert sky or the luminous night reflections off cliffs or the gentle glow at the water’s surface before a storm at sea. She often digs and mixes her own pigments and focuses on visceral transition but her clues may be as subtle as a cast of light crossing a rock face. Her passion for materials and pigment extends into eco dying of fabrics and weaving.

In a recent interview McIntyre stated, “An actual visceral experience combined with the energy of the land is what I attempt to project and provoke in the viewer. At this time, all of my work is a continuation of my exploration and participation in the compelling spiritual qualities of nature.  I realize that I delight in exploring the stillness, the power, the surprise, the disquieting edge and the accepting humor of this world. My love of gesture, light, color, layering, history, change and growth combine in the physical, emotional and for me spiritual act of painting.”

Critics have said, “She dances with paint.” “Delicious color, eloquent gesture and luxuriant talent radiate from these paintings.” “Sensuous, subtle. Intimate paintings that sometimes slap you in the face but more often caress.” “Revealing spiritual and artistic brilliance.” “A sensuous feast.”