Artist Jennifer Lynch creates an alchemy between the familiar and abstract

The images of Jennifer Lynch entice viewers to inhabit a space halfway between the familiar and the abstract.

The Santa Fe artist creates otherworldly compositions reminiscent of astral bodies and the cosmos through both macrocosm and microcosm.

The artist and master printmaker exhibits her work at Albuquerque’s Richard Levy Gallery. The show spans selections from various bodies of work across 12 years. She titles her paintings with the names of asteroids and the Latin words for wildflowers. She teaches at Santa Fe Community College.

Lynch’s inspirations stem from networks found in nature, from the nervous system to crystalline structures. She reconfigures compositions from previous works while fiddling with scale to create new perspectives.

Lynch paints using printing inks, stencils and masks (stencil negatives.)

“I paint like a printmaker,” she said. “There’s a lot of back and forth. It’s very process-oriented. It’s a dialogue between me and the work.

“A lot of the prints I do come from the photographic process,” she continued. “It’s very evolutionary. It’s one series after another; one thing informs the next.”

Lynch grew up in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of a surgeon and a homemaker who studied art. Her mother often took her to museum art classes.

“My mother was a very good draftsman and did some painting,” Lynch said. “It’s just the only thing that really engaged me; nature and art. And I like figuring out puzzles.”

She would go on to earn her bachelor’s degree at the Kansas City Art Institute and her master’s in fine arts degree at New York’s Hunter College, concentrating on printmaking and photography.

She moved to New Mexico 30 years ago, working for the artist Larry Bell in Taos for years.

But it was a 2007 trip to Europe that forged her artistic scaffolding.

“I was in a show with Charlie (Strong, the Taos artist) in Florence,” she said. “We took the train and saw every Caravaggio we could.” Caravaggio’s paintings are known for their intense realism and the use of strong contrasts between dark and light.

“That’s when I decided I wanted to paint again,” she said. “They just exuded this light and feeling. It was probably one of the best days of my life. That was when I decided I wanted the light to come from within my painting.

“That drew me to the spectrum and color,” she added. “First it was chromatic gray, and then I went into color.”

That passion for color work explodes in “Iridium,” a 2011 ink on panel, named for a chemical element found only in asteroids.

The structure of patterns became the canvas for color.

Her patterns, taken from photographs, have included falling water, tidal pools, leaves, rain, water drops, fire and lava.

“I would cut them out and reorganize them and make them into collages,” Lynch said. “I would do these viscosity prints.”

The series moved from crystals to fractals to chemicals, hovering between structural and ethereal space.

In 2021’s “Mithra” is a softer-edge painting based on a previous work called “Cleo.” Geometric shapes float and sweep across an airy background.

“I restructured it and added these crystal fractal structures,” she said.

The smaller paintings “Deteria & Helenium” grew from a hike amid blooming wildflowers.

“I do a lot of hiking,” Lynch said. “Last year, we had so much rain and we had lots of flowers. The purple and red were so dominant in the forest I decided to do these happy little paintings.”

Lynch also finds inspiration in the shapes of the great German architect and furniture designer Mies van der Rohe and his “Barcelona” chair.

“The reason they’re so comfortable is because the back and the legs are round,” Lynch said. “None of our bones are straight; they’re curved.”

Her work “goes back and forth between the hard and the ethereal,” she said. “It’s two forms of language I’ve created. A lot of people say this looks very cosmic.”

Lynch’s recent exhibitions include a 2022 group show at the Albuquerque Museum and a solo show at the Taos Art Museum in 2019. Her work was recently presented by the Richard Levy Gallery at Intersect Palm Springs last February.