#contemporaryart – Lyn Horton

White Characters, 2013

June 22, 2021 lhorton2014Leave a comment

These drawings are all small, five and half inches by four and a half inches. Pigmented pen on black rag paper.

The “character” designation manifests my concern with developing a language of sorts, even though no character means anything, only itself. This group of nine was not the only time I dealt with this stepping off point.

The language has to do with the actual drawing of the curve which is cursive in nature: trusting myself to begin and end at the same place when I made the single line that is the initial curve before cross-hatching over it.

50 Lines within a Square, 1973

June 21, 2021 lhorton2014Leave a comment

These drawings adhered to the “concept” of doing them which is denoted by the titles. Seriously, the titles go on and on in a conceptual-art-descriptive format unfolding every detail of the idea that can be verbalized.

Top: “25 Attempts to Fill a Square with 50 non-ruled lines…”

Bottom: Top: “25 Attempts to Fill a Square with 50 ruled lines…”

These drawings were shown at the Claire S. Copley Gallery in 1974.

Single Loopy Lines 1-9, 2013

June 21, 2021 lhorton2014Leave a comment

I never stop believing in the simplicity of these kind of lines.

Each is fourteen by eleven inches. Plain ol’ pen on rag paper.

Five Wavy Lines, 1973-4

June 20, 2021June 21, 2021 lhorton2014Leave a comment

These eleven drawings are only the beginning of repeating the same drawing intentions over and over again on the same-sized paper. I dealt with lines across the page here as if they marked horizon lines.

My interest in the horizontal line equates with the view from my studio window at CalArts my last year and a half there when I was doing graduate work for my MFA degree.

I was committed to maintaining the minimalism and clarity of my ideas. But that changed. The horizontal lines resulted in the series, Still Life with Curves, 1-24, which were exhibited at Claire S. Copley Gallery in 1974.

Untitled Drawings, 2012

June 8, 2021 lhorton2014Leave a comment

These drawings have no meaning. They are mere vehicles to move the colored pencil around the paper in a fairly uniform way. They are all small, maybe 9 inches by 8 inches. A contrast to the large black and white drawings also executed in this year.

Twigs, 2020

October 19, 2020 lhorton2014Leave a comment

These small drawings came out of seeing a tiny pile of twigs on my drawing table. The twigs had broken off apple tree branches with which I was making a large sculpture. I made the little pile because I knew that there was something interesting there.

In order to find the vision I imagined I would have, I photographed the pile. I enlarged the picture on the computer and made it black and white.

I traced individual black and white images on light blue paper and made each a different color, intending to span a legitimate “spectrum.”

I couldn’t have done this series without imaginary and sometimes actual conversations with Allan McCollum.

Doubles, 2020

October 19, 2020October 19, 2020 lhorton2014Leave a comment

These drawings are derived from photographs that were taken of the hanging wrapped branch sculptures, the All Tied Up Series (https://lynhorton.net/category/art/2019/). Individual photographs were traced along a dividing line placed on a 15 inch by 11 inch piece of paper. The same traced image was then flipped and positioned in the other side of the dividing line to create an entirely new shape.

I could not have done these without an imaginary conversation with Allan McCollum.