Lynley Lally is not one of those artists who’s been practising her craft for decades. In fact she considers herself a late bloomer as she only started painting in her early 50s and hadn’t picked up a paint brush since leaving high school.
“When I was in school I wanted to be an art teacher but you know how it is… you leave school, go off and live your life and plans change,” Lynley says.
“I met a man, had children and then tragedy struck as he died when the kids were very small. He was only 40 and I was 30 and I had two little kids to care for, so my life became that of a single mum raising children.”
One of those children experienced a lot of illness and needed to spend large amounts of time in hospital, so Lynley was forced to keep her artistic dreams suppressed and instead became a phlebotomist. The years rolled on and after the kids left home she moved to the country where her dormant desire to be an artist rose to the surface.
Having never used oil paints before, Lynley sought guidance from accomplished Walpole artist Des Brennan and after learning how to mix colours and use various mediums she finally started to paint in earnest.
“I paint scenes that mainly feature land and ocean but of course it’s not as simple as that. I’m also obsessed with clouds; stormy ones, wispy ones. I can get quite distracted when driving because I’m constantly looking at the clouds.”
In talking about her technique, Lynely says she never draws an outline of the picture on the canvas first. She just starts painting. The background comes first and she then builds the picture towards the foreground.
This creates a depth of field and as Lynley says: “nature is not flat, it is multileveled. It’s capturing the light and creating the depth of field that I love more than anything. It may look like I’m painting trees but it’s not particularly the tree that I’m interested in. It’s the light behind the tree or the shadow on the tree trunk.
“Anyone can paint a tree but to make it look like it’s got depth or like you’re walking towards something or walking down a track, that’s the artistic part.”
Lynley adds that the use of oils is one of the key components to capturing light and shadows and describes her technique as ‘messy quick’ as she’s not someone who pre-plans a picture, preferring to be spontaneous.
As Lynley paints using a combination of palette knives and brushes the process of getting the paint on the canvas may be quick but the finishing off can take several weeks as oil takes a considerably long time to dry. But as Lynley is quite prolific she can have several canvases underway at the same time – all in various stages of completion.
Lynley is also not one of those artists that paints ‘small’. She prefers large canvases and does several large-scale private commissions each year. She also enters a variety of competitions and her pinboard is filled with so many prize certificates that she ran out of room for them years ago.
“It’s not really the winning that gives me joy, it’s more that the judges are people who know about art and they see something worthy in my paintings,” she said.
