By Ward Peck
Editor

Cape Elizabeth’s Lynda Litchfield is enjoying her second chance at a life as an artist.
Born in Newton, Mass., Litchfield moved to Maine to attend Bates College in Lewiston. At the time, the school did not have an art major at the time.

“I kind of made up my own major,” Litchfield said.

After graduating from Bates, she began her life as an artist and enjoyed some success, exhibiting her work in the 1970’s, but not enough to make a living. She soon got married and had two kids. The time and financial pressures of raising a family forced her to find a more practical and financially stable way to apply her creative abilities, so she began a career as a graphic artist and illustrator. Litchfield began her new career first with an advertising agency in Portland and then as a freelance artist for hire.

“The plan when I graduated was to be a painter. I did that and then had two children and then became a single mother, which forced me to change,” she said.

“In the last 14 or 15 years, I went back to being a full-time artist in the studio.”
Her transition back to the artist’s life was gradual. She said she became more and more selective in choosing her clients.

With her kids now in their 20’s and out of the house– a daughter in Thailand learning underwater filmmaking and a son in New York City splitting his time between an office job and making music in a rock band– Litchfield is able to spend her working hours in her home studio.

Throughout her second career, Litchfield said she never fully left the art world– reading art journals, traveling, attending exhibits– which she said helped he make the transition back again.

“I approached graphic design from the perspective of painting. I tried to do both and held on to it in part throughout. It didn’t go away,” she said.

While Litchfield tried to remain as connected to the art world as possible, she said the responsibilities of parenthood kept her from an essential requirement of any artist– uninterrupted time in the studio.

“I didn’t show [my work] for a while. I just worked.”

Her ability to dedicate that time sequestered in her studio has begun paying off in the last decade.

In 1996 and 1997 Litchfield began exhibiting her work in group shows. A few years later she began a professional relationship with art dealer June Fitzpatick who own a gallery on High Street in Portland. She has remained with the Fitzpatrick Gallery to the present in addition to a relationship with the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord, NH.

In April, two of Litchfield’s works will be part of the Portland Museum of Art’s 2007 Biennial Exhibition. Her works will be among 98 works exhibited out of more than 3,600 submitted.

It will be Litchfield’s third biennial exhibition. Her work was chosen for the 2001 and 2003 shows as well.

“I submitted for the 2005 show, but didn’t get in,” she said.

She said even though she had been selected for the two previous shows, that rejection still hurt.

“No one likes it.”

Rejection is a fact of the artist’s life as much as the urge to create.

“John Bisbee once said that he would get excited when he got a rejection letter– the idea being that you need to get a certain amount of rejections before you become accepted and each rejection was one more under his belt.”

She said the selection process for shows such as the biennial is fraught with subjectivity.

“I view it as chance or serendipity. Every biennial is three different judges. If you could send in the same work every two years, you would get different responses.”

Her advice to artists trying to deal with rejection is to keep applying because the circumstances that lead to the rejection may not be present the next time around. It is advice she acknowledges that is easier said than done.

Her work itself is abstract. Her medium is known as encaustic. Encaustic, meaning “to burn in” is a mixture of pigment and wax. The process involves heating the wax to brush it on the surface. It predates oil painting. The ancient Egyptians used it in their “mummy portraits,” which have retained their vivid colors over the millennia. The process died out only to be revived again in the 20th century. The American painter Jasper Johns is often given the credit for bringing the medium back into popularity. An iconic example of Johns use of encaustic is his work, “Flag,” which he created in 1954 using encaustic and oil applied to fabric and mounted on plywood.

“I got interested in encaustic after seeing a show in New York City. I saw that work in the context of what I was doing at the time and I decided to apply it.

Her style is far different from attempting to represent a thing, such as a flag, in which an artist has an idea of what something will look like when the work is complete.

Litchfield’s work is more a narrative of the process of creating itself– the work looks back at itself through the layers of strokes that have been applied and scraped off.

In her artist’s statement, a work in process as well, she writes about her work, “I work in layers of wax, graphite and oil paint, scraping away the surface, revealing, re-covering, reworking and repeating the process again and again… The painting becomes a remnant of itself.

Expanding on this idea she explained, “Because of the way the wax hardens, the brush stroke is frozen onto the work surface. Once it hardens, you can scrape it away, but part of the stroke always remains. It’s a very physical way of working.”

Her paintings are often muted, existing not within the spectrum of red and green but between black and white. What color there is, is muted and applied sparingly.

When people hear the term “Maine Artist,” the image often conjured are those of Andrew Wyeth or Winslow Homer and images of rocky coasts and rural life. Litchfield said that even though her work doesn’t represent such images, place still matters.

“Georgia O’Keefe once said she couldn’t work in Maine because it is all green and gray. My palette is kind of like that. I live by the water– I love the fog. My marks are derived from the environment and what is around me. In terms of light and what it does, place is important. If I lived somewhere else, it would be reflected in what I do.”

But Litchfield doesn’t like talking about her work in the intellectualized vocabulary of art theory. She prefers the ultimate purpose of art– to be looked at.

“I’m ambivalent about using words about my work. I’m interested in the experience of standing in front of the painting and reacting to it.”

It is an experience many will have an opportunity to experience when the biennial opens April 12.