"Taetzsch" is pronounced as one
            syllable rhyming with the letter "H." Or simply call
            me "Lynne."

            
About the Artist

            
Lynne Taetzsch was born in East Orange,
            New Jersey and grew up in Irvington and Newark, New Jersey. She
            was interested in art from the time she was a child, spending
            her allowance on arts and crafts supplies, painting the school
            windows for the holidays, and winning a class drawing contest
            in eighth grade. As a young teenager she took oil-painting lessons
            from a local artist and later she was president of her high-school
            art club.



            At Rutgers University, the University of Southern California,
            and the University of California, Lynne took art classes in painting,
            print-making, drawing and pottery. But the biggest influence
            on her art was the two years she spent at Cooper Union for the
            Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, where she had
            classes in calligraphy, architectonics, one and two dimensional
            design, life drawing, and painting. This is when her work gradually
            became more abstract as she experimented with collage materials
            in an intense focus on composition.

            
Lynne has lived in Florida, California,
            New Jersey, Virginia, Kentucky, and now in the beautiful Finger
            Lakes region of New York State. She's worked as a secretary,
            a writer, an editor, a publisher, a junior-high English and Math
            teacher (six months), a business trainer and manager, a Kirby
            vacuum cleaner salesperson (one week), a leather crafter, and
            a college professor. Through most of it, she kept painting, and
            since the spring of 2000 she has been painting full time in her
            studio in Ithaca, New York.

            
In the early eighties Lynne switched from
            oil paint to acrylics. She found that acrylics fit her style
            better because they dry quickly. She works on a painting over
            many days, adding layers that accumulate without totally eradicating
            the previous images. She paints standing up, listening to loud
            music. The process of painting in broad gestures with a brush
            or palette knife gives her work its sense of intense energy.
            Like jazz, the heart of her art is improvisation.

            
Lynne's work has been shown in solo and
            group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United
            States and abroad. Stan Bowman, professor emeritus of the Cornell
            University Art Department, said in a review of Lynne's show at
            the Clinton House ArtSpace in Ithaca: "Taetzsch is a painter
            very much in the tradition of the best of 20th century abstraction."

            
Describing her painting process, Lynne
            says: 

            I am of course indebted to all the artists who came before me,
            for the wonderful ways they have transmuted color, line and shape.
            Some of my very special art connections are Miro, Kandinsky,
            Matisse, DeKooning, Hans Hoffman, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan
            Mitchell.

            
In the early stages of a painting, I work
            very fast. This helps give my art its sense of energy and spontaneity.
            I like to trick my conscious mind by not letting it have too
            much control over what happens. In some ways I'm creating a mess
            or a problem that I then have to solve in order to make the painting
            work.

            
It's the painting surface that I love -
            the lusciousness of color in its thick and thin varieties, flat
            and opaque to keep the eye on the surface, or transparent and
            airy to suggest deep space. My goal is to stay as close to the
            edge as possible, to keep that sense of organic happening, as
            if the painting had grown itself rather than having been crafted
            by me. Yet it is the artist's eye that seeks to prevail, telling
            the hand to add that last brush stroke which brings it all together.

            
For more art from Lynne visit
            her online home.

            




            

            
Visit John Moulton the featured
            artist from last month