Lynne Boyd: Liminal

• Sheridan Palmer

The Australian artist Lynne Boyd (1953–2022) was known for her exquisite and haunting paintings and prints of solitary figures and fleeting moments and her romantic abstraction of the liminal and the oceanic. Atmospheric hazes, the psychology of distance, and the dynamics of spatiality were essential to her oeuvre. Like few other artists of her time and place, Boyd was able to capture what art historian Rosalind Hollinrake calls the “material presence of the immaterial.”

Boyd began as a self-taught landscape artist in the mid-1970s and developed her uncanny representation of boats, bridges and misty seascapes of Port Phillip Bay during the 1980s. Peter Booth considered her works from this period among the best to emerge from the Victorian College of the Arts, and over the next three-and-a-half decades she obtained a beauty and poetic depth in artworks depicting the irreducible elements of land, sea, and sky. In this respect her work has affinities with the unfathomable qualities that we associate with the Australian modernist Clarice Beckett, the surreal expressionist Georgia O’Keefe, and the quiet minimalism of Agnes Martin.

Published by Index Press and edited by Sheridan Palmer, this compelling and lavishly illustrated overview of Lynne Boyd’s life and art includes discursive and insightful essays by Tim Bass, Vivien Gaston, Rosalind Hollinrake, Leah Kaminsky, Kate and Charles Nodrum and Jason Smith. In a world rife with irony, Boyd’s work has eloquent painterliness and an enigmatic sublimity that is rare and elevating. This book also makes an invaluable contribution to research on contemporary Australian women artists.