KLONARIDIS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-04 published
Recollections of an artist whose absence is palpable
By OLIVER
Girling,
Special to The Globe and Mail Thursday, December
4, 2003 - Page R11
Lynn DONOGHUE loved to paint pictures, and her favourite subject
was the human form.
A spiritual child of the influential David Mirvish Gallery of
the seventies, her work was championed by the gallery's owner
as well as its director, Alkis
KLONARIDIS, when he later opened
on his own. This was noteworthy because the Mirvish Gallery's
domain had been modernist, abstract painting and sculpture, to
the exclusion of almost everything else.
But Lynn's paintings were a kind of hybrid, marrying the flatness
and luminous colour of abstract painting to whimsical representations
of the figure and face. For painting in Toronto, this was an
important step, a bridge between card-carrying abstractionists
like Ric Evans and Jan Poldaas and unabashed figurative artists
then just starting, like the ChromaZone and Republic collectives
and Joanne Tod. Still, historicism doesn't explain or do justice
to the brand new species she invented and practised with lifelong
consistency.
The subjects of her pictures seem sort of animated, the result
of asymmetries that could only be achieved with a live sitter.
Not for her the "95-per-cent Kodak, 5-per-cent art" method (Godard's
ironic deflation of cinema's pretensions); unlike other figurative
painting contemporaries, her use of photographs as aids was minimal.
The result was people in their gawky particularity who look like
they're in the middle of living, rather than idealized, Platonic
masks. (Look at her portrait of the company Dancemakers when
you're in the lobby of the Premiere Dance Theatre in Toronto).
Lucian FREUD needed four sittings from the Queen for his 6-by-10-inch
portrait; Lynn needed at least 20 for her 5-by-6-foot works.
I know, because I sat for her twice. The first time, in New York
in the eighties, she gave me turquoise pants and punked-out hair
in the buttoned-down nineties, I'm more Jimmy Olson, cub reporter.
Both were exaggerations; she relished using clothing as a sensual
and imagist extension of personality.
The experience was energizing and relaxing. Talking non-stop
as she painted, and constantly requiring a response, there was
no danger of my going slack-jawed (this may be another part of
the animation you see in her paintings).
Erudite about art history, she talked about artists and shows,
"the biz," she called it; gossiped big-time; interspersed advice
recipes; homilies. I felt honoured to be invited into such an
intimate situation, to be present at the creation of a work.
The final portraits feel to me like the residue of our conversations,
souvenirs of 20 or so encounters at two junctures in our lives.
A prolific artist (http: //www.lynndonoghue.com), there is still
new work to look forward to. Rumours also exist of a body of
watercolour, male nudes that she was working on which, if true,
would bring her back to her origins, when she painted lumpen,
youthful abstract painters in their full-bodied glory.
In the art community, we're mourning a much-loved friend and
colleague. I don't anticipate meeting her ghost at Dundas and
Roncesvalles, our common Toronto neighbourhood; on the contrary,
it's her absence that's palpable -- her voice especially. It
will be felt by her Friends in various communities, at the Gato
Nero on College Street where she had morning coffee for 20 years,
at a particular pub on Bloor Street, at the high-Anglican church
where she prayed.
Absence has always been one of the clearest motifs in Lynn
DONOGHUE's
work. When abstraction and representation meet, colours, forms
and lines that converge provisionally as a face remember a person
not present.
A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday at the
Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, 477 Manning Ave., Toronto.
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