Lynne Ryall, Hamilton, ON
Lynne Ryall has been painting in her spare time ever since high school, experimenting with different styles and techniques. She is drawn back to her first love, impressionistic landscape painting, and much of her work centres on the stylization and abstraction of the Canadian landscape. Although most of her subject matter is Ontario landscape, she travels extensively in Canada and abroad, taking opportunities to photograph, sketch, and paint on-site. Lynne paints mainly in oils but also works in acrylic and watercolour. Most of her large canvases are painted in the studio, but she also eagerly paints En Plein air. Lynne took studio space at the Cotton Factory in Hamilton after she retired from a career as a secondary school Visual Art, Media, and History teacher with the Peel District School Board.
Artist Statement
My main desire is to capture shapes, textures, edges, colours, light, and reflections on land and water at different times of the day. I aim to create strong, even spiritual, impressions of moments in time. I want to convey my sense of Canadian landscapes in ways that invite viewers to remember and invest meaning in their own memories of similar settings. As Canadians, so many of us are in awe of our country's vast and rugged beauty and build our sense of shared identity around it. Each of my works begins with immersion — my presence — in a landscape. Only from the groundwork of personal immersion, can I mobilize my experience for translation to the canvas. For each work, I spend time on-site photographing, value-sketching, and often doing preliminary watercolour or acrylic En Plein air sketch work before creating the final work.