Lynn Kotula

SHORT BIO:

Lynn Kotula was born in Morristown, NJ in 1945, the daughter of magazine illustrator Jo Kotula. She did not start painting until she was almost 30 years old, when she quit her job as a pre-school teacher and began waitressing so she could paint during the day. She studied with Gabriel Laderman at the Art Students League, with Leland Bell and Gretna Campbell at The New York Studio School, and with Bell and Paul Resika at The Parsons School for Design, where she earned her MFA in Painting in 1980. For the next 40 years she painted still lifes and landscapes in her New York City studio and in and around Lois Dodd’s house in Blairstown, New Jersey where she spent her summers. She died in February, 2021, after living with stage IV cancer for more than six years.

LONGER BIO:

(Adapted from the essay “Worlds Beyond Words” by John Goodrich, which appears in the catalog A Life in Painting 1984-2020.)

Lynn Kotula was born December 4, 1945, in Morristown, New Jersey. Her father was a successful magazine illustrator, especially in the 1940s and 50s before magazines began incorporating color photography, and Lynn had fond memories of gazing among the brushes and paints in his studio. Throughout her childhood, she enjoyed drawing. “I had been a sort of animist,” she recalled. “I felt that in looking at something and drawing I could become the thing—absorb it.”

Her first experiences with contemporary art, however, were less happy. Early studies with a “real NYC painter,” who insisted that abstract painting was a pursuit of “a nothing,” left her cold. She also felt little interest in the “happenings” staged by fellow students in her college art department.

In 1968 Lynn graduated from Douglass College of Rutgers University with a BA in History/Art History. She went on to earn an MA in Early Childhood Education at New York University.

It wasn’t until I graduated from college with a BA in History, moved to New York and started meeting artists who were working from life and doing work that excited me, that I learned that there was a place for me in the world of contemporary art. And I was in the right place to start. There were lots of painters working from life and in a variety of ways.…And plenty of passionate, articulate teachers, wonderful artists themselves. And I gradually learned that thinking abstractly was not thinking about “nothing” but thinking about “something”—something essential—that would become integral to my own work.

When she was almost 30 years old, Lynn embarked on the life of an artist. She quit her job teaching young children and began waiting tables at Paulson’s Supper Club on West 72nd Street in order to devote her daylight hours to painting. Over the next several years, she studied with Gabriel Laderman at the Art Students League, with Leland Bell and Gretna Campbell at The New York Studio School, and with Bell and Paul Resika at the Parsons School for Design, where she earned her MFA in Painting in 1980.

During these years in school, Lynn worked almost always from a model, with occasional outings to paint the landscape. She turned the living room in her West 121st Street apartment into a painting studio, eventually expanding the work space to include the dining room as well. For the next four decades, this studio served as the locus of her painting life in New York. In it she painted what was at hand: household objects and fabrics, set up on a couple of old wooden tables.

In 1985, a few days before her first solo exhibition, Lynn met Tony Stewart, a writer and filmmaker commencing on a new career in software development and consulting. As Lynn described it, she had occasionally spotted Tony at the local swimming pool, and one day took the opportunity of lounging strategically by the pool’s ladder. The gambit worked: a brief conversation led to dinners and, before long, romantic attachment. The two married in 1988, and the following year Lynn moved in with Tony, keeping her 121st Street space as a studio.

The year 1988 brought Lynn the opportunity of renting a floor in the painter Lois Dodd’s house near the Delaware Water Gap. Lynn and Tony commenced on what turned out to be a life-long routine: spending the summer months in the country, where Lynn could devote herself to both the landscape and still lifes set up in Lois’ studio.

The leap from carefully composed still life to the broad, ever-changing outdoors took some adjustment, but the artist persevered, and settled into a year-round routine:

I spend most of the year indoors. From Labor Day to Memorial Day I paint orderly compositions from still lifes of my own design. In June I’m eager for the chance to return to the landscape. Whereas in painting from a still life I stand and look at my set up, constructing my painting from edges and cohesive forms; in the landscape, I stand in the midst of my painting, trying to distinguish the bushes from the trees and the vines. It’s disorienting at first to be without my open table top; but it’s challenging and fun to sort my way through the chaos of greens and find sense in this fluid environment. Outdoors, of course, along with the changing light, there are storms, bugs—AND—occasionally, a bear, something I never see in my studio.

Lynn used larger canvases for her still lifes, often working for weeks on a single painting. The still lifes appealed to her sense of order and containment: “There’s something in the act of choosing and arranging that compels me. I like the step of devising before I paint.” In Lois’ studio, she usually set up the still lifes on one of two particular tables, with the light coming from behind the artist, so the objects’ shadows retreated into the depths. (By contrast, the shadows in the still lifes painted in the 121st Street studio, which had windows to the side of her tables, routinely flow left or right. She never painted under artificial light, preferring to work even as the daylight dimmed to dusk.)

Working outdoors involved a wholly different scale and method of attack:

In the landscape I paint on small panels, aiming to complete a painting in one day, before the landscape is transformed by man or nature. I usually paint several paintings from a site, each time finding something more or new. It’s a little like falling in love.

The demands of still life and landscape painting, while very different, turned out to complement each other. “…as I paint I reflect on my still life painting,” she explained, “when I return to my studio, I have the landscape in my head. Each informs and enriches the other.”

Often asked if she were inspired by Lois Dodd’s work, Lynn’s answer was always the same: though a great admirer, she wasn’t consciously affected by working in Lois’ studio. But Lynn did allow that being surrounded by Dodd’s luminous paintings for several months each summer must have influenced her on some unconscious level.

In 2014, Lynn was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic cancer. Over the next six years she underwent a number of standard as well as experimental treatments. She endured several surgeries and prolonged hospital stays. Between treatments, however, she continued to paint with undiminished intensity. Tony describes this difficult but productive time:

…when she was finally able to go back to the studio she started making very simple setups…Not knowing how much time she had left, she wanted to start painting as quickly as possible and make as many paintings as she could while she still had the strength. From that urgency came a new kind of freedom, a lack of self-consciousness in the setup, and the result is the series of small paintings she made in the last five years of her life. She loved making these paintings; for a long time they came almost effortlessly to her, and both the process and the results gave her great pleasure.

While living with cancer, Lynn produced enough paintings to have two more solo shows at the Bowery Gallery and a substantial presence in a group show, Rooms With a View, at the Westbeth Gallery. When she could no longer paint she made a series of small drawings around the house.

Lynn’s last works to be shown publicly were three pen and ink drawings of her cats, Boo and Lily, which she made in November 2020; they can be seen in the Drawings gallery of this site. She died in February, 2021.