LYNNE GRAHAM

LYNNE GRAHAM

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Image courtesy Lynne Graham and The Gallery/art placement inc.

"Isolation"

Lynne Graham, "Isolation," 2014, oil pastel and oil stick on matboard, 9.9" x 10".

The sensitively rendered still-life drawings in Saskatoon artist Lynne Graham’s most recent series, Tracings, have as their generative impulse her late mother’s struggles with memory loss.

Graham grew up making art with her mother, and watched sadly as the woman she knew slipped behind the blank canvas of Alzheimer’s disease. One day, Graham gave her mom some drawing paper and set up a still life, hoping to revive a creative spark.

“She stared at it a long time,” says Graham. “Then, all of a sudden, she picked up an apple and she just put it on her paper and she traced around and around and around it. And then she did it with some of the other fruit. And I thought: ‘Well, she still can problem solve a bit.’ ”

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Image courtesy Lynne Graham and The Gallery/art placement inc.

"I Want My Life Back"

Lynne Graham, "I Want My Life Back," 2014, oil pastel and oil stick on matboard, 11.6" x 11.6"

As Graham continued with her own practice, she noticed one night that a drawing she was working on just wasn’t coming together. She began to trace objects from the array before her, just as her mother had.

“It just became a practice that I started to use,” she says.

Graham, who attended the University of Saskatchewan as a mature student, graduating in 1990, employs a range of drawing tools such as oil sticks, oil pastels and graphite.

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Image courtesy Lynne Graham and The Gallery/art placement inc.

"There’s That Song"

Lynne Graham, "There’s That Song," 2014, oil pastel and oil stick on matboard, 8.8" x 10.8".

Engaging the visual languages of both drawing and painting, her work features a tentative line and assertive colour that acknowledges form, but with a looseness that belies the classical tradition. Her surfaces are worked heavily, adding to the richness of expression.

Graham’s drawings, essentially, are tactile memories – whether the glow of sunshine on a bowl of fruit or the warmth of a mother’s embrace.

Lynne Graham is represented by The Gallery, Art Placement, in Saskatoon. Her work sells for $100 to $1,000.