A modest first exhibition

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33933, 28 August 1975, Page 7

A modest first exhibition

Lynn Zylstra has opened her first public exhibition at the C.S.A. Gallery showing twentyfive paintings, almost exclusively of female figures.

She is a modest unpretentious painter producing work which could by no means be thought to be innovatory: nor could it be said to wander at all from well trodden pathways. She draws from a private world of introspected domesticity. The nude emerges on a brass bed, among sunflowers, and in the landscape; the clothed figure at the table, in the doorway, always in an environment of intimate familiarity. A delight in the process of

painting and especially in the treatment of the figure is everywhere evident. There is no evidence of a personal -painterly awareness, a conscious pursuit of particular aims and intentions, only this joy derived from the activity and the compositional problems it presents. She possesses a strength which might in other circumstances allow her to step outside the milieu of domestic incident within which her art revolves and in which she shelters. Yet perhaps part of her strength lies in this evident satisfaction with her world. It is manifestly the painting of a woman unconcerned with fashionable criticism of the maternal domestic woman. As is consistent with a painting without conscious or obvious direction, the use of the motif, here the figure, moves to and fro between analytical study and a free adaptation of its components subordinated to overriding comnositional criteria.

Here and there parallels spring to mind. They are perhaps conscious, perhaps unconscious. “The Table” resembles the ModersohnBeckers form of domesticity: “Figure Composition” and “Portrait” the blue and pink Picasso periods; the figure and her sumptuous garment in “White Dress” certain Botticelli figures. The exhibition will close on September 6. —T.L.R.W,