Bill Lynch
"Untitled", c. 1990s
Colored pencil on paper
20 3/4 x 17 5/8 x 1 1/4 inches (52.71 x 44.77 x 3.18 cm)
Courtesy of Gerry Lynch

Selected by Laura Hoptman

Bill Lynch (1960 - 2013) was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in New Jersey. He studied art at Cooper Union. Lynch immersed himself in making drawings and paintings for over three decades, living in New York, California, and finally North Carolina.

Painting onto pieces of salvaged scrap wood (sometimes on both sides), Lynch depicted birds, animals, blossoming branches, waterfalls, Chinese vases, statuettes and landscapes. The artist’s loaded, seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes betray his investment in Chinese and Japanese painting whilst evoking his American roots. His confident gestures combine a dry lambent brush and thick pasty paint. The moiré woodgrain on the rough boards are often absorbed into his compositions, becoming a still body of water or suggesting a moving sky. Knots and grain in the wood seem to inspire the superimposition of moons, mushrooms, flowers or vessels.

Lynch also produced small studies in Conté pencil on paper, featuring similar subject matter including nesting and flying birds, a pair of hands at a piano, trees and wildflowers emphasize the great tenderness and sensitivity with which Lynch treated his beloved subject matter.