Lynda Lowe

"Gather"

2001
watercolor, oil ,and mixed media on wood panel
18"x 80"

$7800 - sold


"Release"

2001
watercolor, oil ,and mixed media on wood panel
18"x 80""

$7800 - sold


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Current Exhibition

By A Grace of Sense

October 12 - November 13, 2001

Reviews

By a Grace of Sense
by Richard Tobin
in THE Magazine, Santa Fe, NM
July, 2001

Last month’s exhibit of work by Lynda Lowe at Peyton Wright featured a series of multi-media panels combing 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 images, 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 antiques and vintage implements. What merits the series more attention than its elegant artifice, however, is Lowe’s efforts to inject the craft and imagery with metaphor.

Taken together, the panels evoke a treasured scrapbook of pages salvaged from some edition of French philosophe Deras 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 Enlightenment rationalism, not to mention the 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 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 tie 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."

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Related links

  • for more on Lynda Lowe, visit www.lyndalowe.com