Lynda Lowe

Lowe’s body of work ranges from recognizable likenesses to entirely abstract terrains. She has a cultivated interest in archetypal and metaphorical associations and approaches image-making with both careful study and investigation and with unplanned intuitive interaction. Her many-layered paintings incorporate an interplay of text fragments, spontaneous marks, diagrammatic figures, open areas of eroded color, and highly rendered recognizable images. This combination is intended to engage various mechanics of perception – empirical, rational, relational, intuitive, abstract, and symbolic. Some inclusions are so small and subtle as to be seen only with closest examination and suggest the quantum world underlying all experience. Consistent through all of Lowe’s work is a meditative aspect that speaks to the intersection between the physical world and the mysterious unknown. She proposes that no thought or thing is utterly passive or inert but charged with complex content and a sentient presence.

After receiving her MFA at Indiana University, Lowe taught university and graduate students for fifteen years in Illinois. She left her academic position, moved from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, and began full-time studio work. Lynda Lowe’s artwork has been widely exhibited in over forty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums across the country. She was the recipient of two Artist Fellowships, and several assistance grants from the Illinois Arts Council, named a Distinguished Resident of Ragdale Foundation’s arts colony, received a Ford Foundation research grant, and was a finalist of the Neddy Award. Her work can be found in many private and public collections and museums, most notably Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of Glass, the Art and Embassy program in Bern, Switzerland, the Illinois State Museum of Art, the St. George Museum of Art, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and Seattle University.

PATRA VESSELS

These bowls are an extension of a project titled, “The Patra Passage,” in which the artist hand-built 108 ceramic vessels paired with small paintings and presented in handmade wooden boxes. Inspired by the alms bowls monks carry, these bowls are symbols of interdependence and an openness to the cycle of giving and receiving. The Sanskrit origin of patra translates as “the vessel that never goes empty,” grounding the work in the offerings of the present moment. In the first iteration of this project, the artist gifted all 108 vessels with instructions to continue the cycle of giving from person to person for one year. Ultimately the vessels circulated through over 500 people in over 40 states and 5 countries before returning for exhibition at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.  Each ceramic Patra Vessel comes with a paired painting and handmade wooden box.

Additional Works