The Reality of Our Seeing

Dearest friend of my youth,

I ’ve wrestled with, and then worried about, the form this piece should take for some time now, for days and weeks, really, because on some level I wanted to write to you out of the same kind of immediacy, not to say intimacy, that Lynette’s images engender in me, and to get at that immediacy—the feeling of one voice addressing another—I finally settled on the epistolary form, just as Lynette’s paintings can be viewed as letters sent from that currently under-explored land we might as well call the imagination, letters and thoughts from the depths of Lynette’s imagination and strong hand, depicting figures sometimes standing still and sometimes sitting upright in landscapes, terrains, and fields of color that are germane to Lynette’s style, a style that, before you know it, floods your mind with her characters, let’s call them that, who inhabit scenes where “nothing” happens but the experience of being, and then there you are again, standing a bit away from the canvas, looking further at what Lynette has wrought, in, say, green unused areas—areas not filled with a vase or bed or person; patches of color that are “just” color—and just as suddenly, it seems, there is the green of your mind planting ideas and feelings about what Lynette has described without words but using a different kind of language, a language of brush and scale and colors the world has known before but not seen.