I am delighted that Lyn Asselta has agreed to share some words with us about her process of finding views to paint among the most ordinary-seeming landscapes. I have to admit that when I first read what she wrote, I was so moved, I was brought to tears.
I came across Lyn’s work a couple of years ago and was so taken by a piece, I featured it in one of my first monthly curations. To give you a sense of what she does, have a look at this:
I love the absolute ordinariness of this scene and the extraordinary painting Lyn Asselta has made of it. This is what Lyn has to say about the painting:
In the farmlands of the South, it’s common to see these “clumps” of trees. I wonder all the time if they were planted to shade an old farmhouse or to give field workers a place to get out of the sun. Nowadays, these trees stand in the fields, proud, but no longer providing shade for anyone but each other. In this painting, I felt as though the trees and the phone poles were both obsolete in their own ways.
Lyn Asselta Bio
First, a wee bit about Lyn.
Lyn is a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America and holds Masters’ Circle status with the International Association of Pastel Societies (IAPS). She is an avid plein air painter and participates in plein air events as often as she can. Lyn teaches both studio and plein air pastel workshops to students of all levels. She is the founder and current co-president of the First Coast Pastel Society in northeast Florida. Lyn says, ”My artistic career took me in many directions before I settled in with pastels, but this medium allowed me to get my hands dirty, to layer and blend, and to finally have a means to say what I wanted to say about the landscape.” You can see more of her work at her website.
And now, let me hand the blog over to Lyn!
In Lyn Asselta’s Words
I’m so honored to have been asked by Gail to write a guest blog! When she asked me to write about finding the extraordinary in everyday places, I found myself thinking hard about her request. I tend to like to paint very ordinary places; places that perhaps would be overlooked, so I get asked this question quite a bit. This time though, I wanted to really take the time to consider what it is that makes these places seem extraordinary to me.
Living on the beach in Florida doesn’t always guarantee sunny days. Because the beaches are unobstructed for great distances, the clouds sometimes just seem to roll through. This particular day was storming off and on and these huge clouds were massing in-between downpours. I wanted the feel of the wind moving in different directions and I wanted to convey the enormity of the clouds. I sometimes feel the need to let people see a different aspect of the state I live in. There is so much variety here and I wanted people to feel the chill of the damp wind despite the sun. When I look at this, I still feel like I need to grab a sweatshirt out of my car!
I suppose what I’d most like you to know is that I’m not trying to romanticize these places. Instead, I want to recognize them…the way one would recognize an old friend after years of being apart. I want you to see the beauty of a place, but I also want you to see its flaws, because it’s those flaws that allow its soul to seep out. We find the soul of a place in its worn spots, its imperfections, its fury or its quiet solitude. Perfection masks the true soul of a place just as it can mask the soul of a person. So, to me, beauty isn’t about perfection, it’s about that elusive “something” that makes you want to know more… the element of intrigue… the part that is just beyond the visible.
This may have been the beginning of my obsession with telephone lines. This little scene is next to a gas station and could be anywhere, which is probably why I like it. Funny, but at the time I painted it, I had no idea that in a few years I would build a house a couple streets from here. The scene hasn’t changed much over the past few years, but I love the morning light here and the way the telephone lines lead you across the street.
As a painter, we tend to look for interesting shapes and forms and lines. We are always composing in our heads. We look for light and shadow and contrasts. We are enamored with color and its effect on our work. We can put all of these elements into a painting and it still may not say what we want it to say. Our head knows the “rules” of painting, but it’s our heart that needs to supply the emotional context that will create a way for our paintings to speak with a voice of their own.
Marshes. They’re all around me where I live. So, how do I distinguish one marsh from the next? In this little painting, my decision came from the date that I painted it. It was a hot day in August and I decided to make the painting more about the color and the temperature of the day than the place itself. I wanted it to tell the story of the intense heat in the distance so I cooled off the foreground and heated up the horizon. I wanted to give the feeling that I was standing in a shady spot, separated from the actual heat on the marsh grass.
I tell my students to look for adjectives instead of nouns. Find ways to paint as though painting was poetry. Don’t look for a tree…look for branches made of whisper-thin threads of silver forming gossamer webs against the sky! (how’s that?!) Perhaps you’re looking at an old barn or warehouse…look for sheets of rusted, corrugated metal, heavy with the dents of countless flatbed trucks carelessly using these flimsy walls as convenient bumpers when offloading their cargo. How can you paint the way a boulder feels? Has it been worn by wind or water or thousands of pairs of feet treading over it along the same path?
Places have stories to tell!
This painting was a real break thru for me. I had been sitting in my car in a parking lot, waiting to meet someone during a rainstorm. Next to the parking lot was this old building and these two palm trees. They seemed to speak to me of their loneliness and they actually seemed more than abandoned; they seemed unloved. I snapped a few photos of them with my phone and I couldn’t get back to the studio fast enough to paint this little scene. I wanted to convey the desolation of this place, but in some odd way, I also felt that if I painted this scene, I could keep those buildings from feeling so alone. I truly felt their story and it made me rethink the way I approached my paintings. This painting is now hanging in the home of a friend, and I feel as though the buildings may still be out there in the rain, but their image is well-loved by someone every day!
Places that may, at first glance, seem somewhat benign can tell an extraordinary story if you take the time to observe rather than just to see. Even as a kid, I always enjoyed the stories and the histories of places I visited. They didn’t have to be grand or spectacularly scenic places… they could be very humble places. When I didn’t know anything at all about a place, I would usually look at it long enough to imagine a story about it.
I’ve had a tendency all my life to connect events and stories to the places where those events happened. Later in life, it was pointed out to me that almost every photo I ever took during a trip or even at home was of the place itself and rarely did I ever put a person in a photograph. For me, this has always been the way I see the world. The landscapes around me are important.
Many of you may have seen this painting of mine. What I love about this painting is that the subject is truly a humble building, but what I actually wanted to paint was the morning light on that building. It was the start of a fall day and the sky was bright with early morning light. The sand was reflecting so many colors! I used to walk past this scene every morning, and this particular morning was special. The old building, a jumble of signs, a rusted set of gates at the top of the ramp…those objects were ways for me to show off the light, rather than to get caught up in the objects themselves. What was really amazing was that two days later, the county paved the ramp road and instead of that beautiful sand, there was now a huge expanse of black tar.
I love wondering what happened in a place before I arrived. I love the history that places can hold. I wonder who walked in the places I’ve walked or who chose the color of the peeling pink paint on the house that I’m driving by. Even in places that show no signs of human habitation; the woods, the coast, a field, a tidal marsh…I tend to want to sit in these places long enough to get to know them. I’ve always found that there is something incredibly peaceful about sitting in a place until you feel you belong there. It’s almost as if you will forever own a bit of a place once you’ve spent time there and become familiar with it.
Another marsh scene with a totally different feel. Sometimes you just want to be alone and a cool, foggy day quiets everything in your life down to almost silence. These are the days I treasure. Painting a foggy day is a chance to give someone else that feeling of stillness in the midst of their everyday life. I grew up on the coast of Maine and I suppose I have carried that feeling of a foggy day with me. The fog not only quiets the sounds around you, but it quiets the noise of a busy landscape. It softens the edges and you can easily imagine yourself in another world where the shapes and objects around you don’t matter…you just need to feel the ground under your feet and the rest falls away.
I once read a quote that said: “There is a way that nature speaks. Most of the time we are not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention.”
I like to take simple subjects and distill them into the most basic forms and color. My beach walks in the morning are always inspiration for small studies. I marvel at the way so few colors and marks can describe the austere feeling of early morning before we can make out more value and color shifts. The beach is such a solitary place at this time of day, and the idea of painting just three elements: sky, water and land, sets me up with a challenge. I want to drop all the quiet and the emotion of the morning into these three things. Although I didn’t turn this one into a larger painting, I love the directness of this image and I feel that it reads large even though it’s small.
It’s the paying attention part that we often fail to give the importance it deserves. To me, the extraordinary comes from the things we see when we really, truly take the time to be observant. The extraordinary is quite often found when we can connect something we see to the way we feel in a place. In my paintings, I try to visually describe both my physical and my emotional reaction to what I’m observing. It may be the light, but it’s not just the light. It may be the color, but it’s not just the color. It has to do with finding the element that makes a place unique…
These trucks looked like they were sinking into the ground…as though they’d been there so long that the tires may have been flat. Why do they get abandoned like that? I wonder if there is anything at all in the silos? The light was so bright this particular day that I felt as though the intense blue might be able to convey the feeling of a bright afternoon here behind this warehouse. It’s a few years later now, and I wonder if the trucks are still there?
Finding the extraordinary can come from all sorts of sources, but if you can pay close enough attention, the extraordinary often finds You. The extraordinary makes itself visible when we pay attention to our senses and when we allow ourselves the time to be observant.
There’s a small farming community near where I live called Hastings. It calls itself The Potato Capital of the World. There is something I love about the orderly, straight rows of crops juxtaposed against the randomness of old farm buildings and clumps of trees. Sometimes I have to smile at how ramshackle the buildings are, yet the crops are so meticulously planted.
Sometimes I drive by the same place dozens of times and then one day I need to pull over and stop. Why is this? I think it’s because on some subconscious level, on all those days that I drove by before, my brain was collecting information. It adds up until one day perhaps the light is a bit different, or the leaves change color on the trees, or the rain is reflecting something interesting, and suddenly that familiar scene has a new story. Because I’ve driven by so many times, I am intimately familiar with this view that has just been transformed and now it’s begging me to notice this new narrative.
Sometimes we just feel the need to document events in our lives. After 20 years, my husband and I were moving to a new home. The neighborhood where all our memories were would no longer be the place we drove home to each night. I didn’t paint our old house, I didn’t paint the neighbors’ houses, what I chose to paint was the cross street that we passed each day before we went into the gates on our side of the community. It was sort of the “entrance” to our neighborhood. The little building is a pump station for the water company and, honestly, I never saw the inside of it. But, I drove by it thousands of times over the years. I always knew that home was just around the corner once I passed this scene. The mailbox and the stop sign seemed to indicate that, indeed, this is someone’s neighborhood…it just would no longer be mine.
So, I ask you to think about considering finding the extraordinary as a search for the soul of a place. Perhaps think of it as listening and take the time to wait until a place speaks to you. In the meantime, observe everything… be conscious of the story behind a place, or even the story behind an object or a person. Observe your senses. Remember that our work is our narrative. Painting is visual poetry. The everyday becomes extraordinary through the eyes of anyone who takes the time to be observant and to pay attention to that whisper of a voice. Remember, beauty doesn’t happen by romanticizing your subject. It happens when you recognize your subject with the eyes of someone who wants to see beyond the surface, beyond the visible.
Sometimes it’s just about joy and having fun. After moving to a new house, spending weeks setting up the studio, company and holidays, it was all about having a great day in my new studio. No rules, no plan, just freedom and color and sharing the contentment I felt in my new surroundings!
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I feel like scripting – “A Moment of Silence” – before continuing.
Are you as moved by Lyn’s wiriting as I was? Are you going to look at all those familiar places you know with a different eye when you go outside after reading this blog? Or are you already one of those who looks at ordinary scenes the same way Lyn does? We’d love to know so please leave a comment.
Again, a huge thanks to Lyn Asselta for taking the time to write this post.
Until next time,
~ Gail
PS. You can see Lyn Asselta giving a brief answer to this very question:
10 thoughts on “Lyn Asselta – Finding The Extraordinary In Ordinary Places”
Wow Gail, I’m blown away by her work!!!! And her narratives about it…she is so very intimate with her subjects. Another wonderful artist to follow. I HAVE to start painting outdoors more!!!!
You are awesome, thank you for this!!!
Becky thank you for your enthusiastic comment!! You feel about Lyn’s work as I do. She is one to watch for sure! I’m glad you enjoyed the post so much 🙂
Gail, what a treat to see Lyn’s beautiful work. Very inspirational!!!!!
It is isn’t it!! Makes me feel there is always something to paint out there!
Blue Cloud Rising: fabulous! Wonderful colours and great energy! I always love seeing the work of pastelists new to me. Thank you to both of you for sharing.
Kerry, thanks for sharing your fav of Lyn’s pieces. I’m delighted to have introduced you to a new-to-you pastellist!
I felt like Lyn was talking about me! She said it so much better though!
😀
Oh many thanks for this sharing ! And how beautiful and great are these pastels ! I’m going to see everyplace around me with new eyes. ..or trying at least !
Oh my gosh, you are so welcome!! I am delighted that Lyn’s work and words have opened your eyes to a new kind of seeing 🙂