Lynn Malin
Lynn Malin, "Vista Near Pine Lake," 2014
Lynn Malin, "Vista Near Pine Lake," 2014, oil on canvas, 48” x 48”
Edmonton artist Lynn Malin has a relationship of some 30 years with landscape painting. She often uses an angled aerial perspective. Vista by Pine Lake, for instance, shows rolling parkland carved into oblong fields in a rich palette of greens and golds that display her obvious joy in making marks.
More recently, Malin has begun to experiment with a substrate of transparent plastic and a vertical aerial perspective that speaks more directly about mapping. She mixes various media, including paint, graphite and pastel, and also incorporates frottage of grates, chicken wire and the like, juxtaposing formal grids with organic passages that evoke natural processes of growth and erosion.
“I’m really looking at the push and pull between man and nature, and how man uses the land,” says Malin. “And also how nature and the land reforms itself, comes back and rejuvenates.” She says the plastic sheets can resemble stained glass. “These are semi-transparent and you can see through them, so when they are mounted on the wall, light will come through them. They change as the light changes, throughout the day.”
Malin, a former school teacher, cites workshops at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan as an important influence. She had a solo show at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff in 2013, and is also working on a major project for an aquatic centre in the Edmonton area.
Lynn Malin is represented by Mountain Galleries in Whistler, B.C., and the Scott Gallery in Edmonton, where her next show runs Oct. 22 to Nov. 12. Her work sells for $500 to $6,000.