Award of Excellence winner Peter E. Lynn setting up his Exhibitor Space at the Santa Fe Convention Center - Art Santa Fe 2022

PETER E. LYNN Award of Excellence winner setting up his Exhibitor Space at the Santa Fe Convention Center - Art Santa Fe 2022

I have always been inspired by architectural and cultural subjects, such as the architectural legacy and urban landscape of neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan in NYC; Marigot, the capital of St. Martin, FWI; and of Santa Fe, New Mexico and surrounding areas. Using architecture and landscape as a design format, the underpainting became more involved with the introduction of highlight and shadow, gradients and variation of color. This underpainting shows a more traditional view of the subject, but with a definitely non-traditional color rendering.

Artist Bio & Statement

I was born and raised in New York City. My parents were both artists who had first met at the Pratt Institute. They encouraged an interest in Fine Art at an early age. Family vacations were creative holidays that included sketching and painting. Every year, the family participated in the Washington Square Art Outdoor Exhibit in New York City, where I sold my first painting at age 5.

While working on a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Iowa, I began exploring relationships between the basic elements of color, form, line and texture on a flat plane...the canvas. My work was purely abstract and I worked exclusively with Acrylics. I was interested more in visual impact and felt that recognizable subject matter was distracting from my objective. During the following years I developed the technique of first applying layers of color (underpainting) and then covering the entire surface with thin, vertical, hand-painted lines of varying opacity. The resulting image was one of unique interplay between color, light and texture.

Living in such diverse places as the Lower East Side in Manhattan NYC, the Caribbean FWI, and currently in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I have always been inspired by local culture, architecture and landscape. I began to incorporate these subjects into my art, while still maintaining my distinctive technique and abstract view.

While working in my SOHO, NY studio, I would take photo excursions around lower Manhattan early Sunday mornings, documenting the historic architectural districts…cast-iron buildings of SOHO NOHO, Tribeca, South Street Seaport area and Lower East Side. In this world of rapid change… before gentrification, renovation and commercial development transformed these places and altered lives forever, I was able to put my perception of these culturally defined landscapes (both urban and natural) to canvas.

Using architecture and landscape as a design format, the underpainting became more involved with the introduction of highlight and shadow, gradients and variation of color. This underpainting showed a more traditional view of the subject, but with a definitely non-traditional color rendering.

My wife and I had been spending our summers in Taos, New Mexico during the 1990’s. We moved to Santa Fe in 2012. Ancient puebloan ruins, canyons, badlands, and Native American cultural events became subjects for me. Today, my abstract paintings are based on the multi-hued, banded strata; broad mesas; steep-sided canyons and stark badlands of the Colorado Plateau. The initial layers are drawn directly from landscape elements, with subsequent layers and a final layer of hand-painted vertical lines transforming the work into its final abstract image.

My work is included in many private, corporate and public collections. I've been represented in art galleries throughout the United States, the West Indies, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Canada and Europe. In 2020, three of my paintings were added to the collection of a premier Caribbean island hotel.