Brian Lynch: A Painter of Modern Life

Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, Brian Lynch has long been a master observer of the quotidian. His observations might at first appear to be ‘aimless’, but they are anything but. In fact, he has a miraculous way of getting inside that moment when you see someone doing something so familiar, so normal, so natural, that it suddenly becomes iconic, archetypal— it’s like a kind of epiphany, really. Pride of place on my studio wall is a small painting Brian made years ago in New York City. A woman in black boots and an enormous cadmium red overcoat, wearing sunglasses and a tall red Moroccan fez, is waiting, for a friend, or maybe for the bus. She’s just had her nails done in the shop she’s standing in front of and you can tell she’s pleased with herself. She’s feeling good about things and she knows she’s looking good, too, though her freshly manicured nails are firmly stuffed into her pockets.

The image is so economical, its lively brushwork so reduced — all you get is the essential. Lynch is a connoisseur of the gesture, too, and like Edgar Degas, he employs gesture with an intuitive facility that defies easy description. It’s often just plain uncanny. I’m looking at the images in this book and sometimes, all you get is the back of someone’s head, or just their legs! What about the swimmer who’s just come up for air or the horse swishing its tail as it gazes into the darkness of the stable door? Or the wonderful bounce and flying hair of the person on the riding lawnmower? These simple gestures are enough to deliver thewhole story, the inner workings of that quotidian moment.

And knowing Brian well, I can say that key to these astute observations is an ever-present empathy, a compassion for his subjects that allows us to laugh with them, and not at them or about them… these are not detached “records” of life, but intimate, revelatory expressions of what it means to be alive and to be here now…

John Smalley

Chertsey, England,

April, 2021