The Brooklyn Rail

Seeing color is one of the great pleasures in life. How we perceive and feel color, the joy and wonder it can bring, exceeds our scientific attempts to define it on color wheels or spectrums. Color not only stimulates our vision but also activates our imagination, triggering unique associations and feelings deep within our unconscious. The best painters tap into this reservoir without inhibition, a claim amply demonstrated by Lynne Drexler’s current exhibition Color Notes. In this show, one sees a genuine exploration of color through experimentation and play rather than theory, inviting us to see color with immediacy and revel in the experience.

The paintings and drawings on view span the 1960s, when a young Drexler was living in New York City. A regular attendee of the opera, she would draw to the music, translating her auditory experience onto paper and eventually into painting. Years later, the artist would leave the city for Monhegan Island, where she lived in relative obscurity, continuing to paint with the support of her island community until her death in 1999.

Drexler’s paintings are composed of swatch-like brushstrokes that vary in size, color, and direction. She created large murmurations of brushwork, overlapping or side-by-side, swarming across the canvas. Her paintings feel explosive, like a blossom opening, and at times turbulent or graceful, as though something has been released into the world, ready to flourish and change. 

Cismont (1962) is a fantastically colorful painting. A large yellow mass lowers into the center of the composition, like Pangaea broken into bits and pieced back together. Squares of green, purple, and red squeeze around the periphery and peek through cracks in the yellow. I enjoyed getting to know the colors up close, letting the chroma flicker and sizzle, seeing variations of gold and gray-green emerge from the yellow. Squint your eyes, and the colors split according to their value, either dark or light. Open your eyes wide and the painting becomes more complex, revealing several levels of depth realized by coordinating warmer and cooler colors. This is how an expert colorist builds space, through visual temperature, intensity, and subtlety.

Despite her consistent application of opaque paint, Drexler leaves small openings where layers of paint, or the underlying raw or tinted canvas, show through. Even in the most compact painting, Orchestrated Blue (1968), there is room to breathe. Here, brushstrokes are placed close together, forming a dense tapestry of paint rather than a porous atmosphere. Other shapes are added to the swatches: suggestive eclipses, stacks of horizontal bars, and a fantastic area of wavy lines that reminded me of Vincent van Gogh’s cypress trees. Drexler is playing with contrast, pairing blue with orange for example, to create striking juxtapositions that feel decisive and confident.

Drawings often take a supporting role in exhibitions focused on painting, but that is not the case here. In a wall of twelve full-sheet drawings made from oil crayon and watercolor, Drexler’s swatch-like strokes flirt with disappearance to a degree that is not achieved in her paintings. The oil crayon allows her to taper the edges of planes and keep forms open-ended, with two colors often blending into each other to create a third. In four of the twelve drawings, a wash of lime green watercolor is poured and brushed over the crayon, the mediums both repelling and settling into one another in unpredictable ways. I loved seeing Drexler play with the competing forces of water and oil.

Drexler’s color combinations are not mere eye candy, but material records of the artist working through joys and conflicts within herself. Against the odds, Drexler found a way to balance opposing forces and create spaces where we can witness simple things coming together in the most complex of ways. She invites us to really see color in all its dynamics, to let it reach into our subconscious, and to be wrapped in the pleasure it brings.