The great American artist Bill Lynch (1960-2013) never had a single exhibition in his lifetime. Almost nothing was written about his wild and beautiful paintings – ancient yet modern, mythological yet supremely contemporary – and they have only gradually started to emerge. Brighton Centre for Contemporary Arts has somehow managed to lay hands on 15 of his elusive works on wood from scattered locations to mount this mesmerising show, the first in a public gallery in the UK. The result is a coup.
Lynch was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the heartlands of Breaking Bad, and studied art at the Cooper Union in New York. He lived in California for a time but ended up in Raleigh, North Carolina, to be close to his family. He seems to have worked intermittently, sometimes as a carpenter, though it is surprisingly hard to discover very much about him.
A portrait exists, by his friend and fellow painter Verne Dawson, which shows a man in a sweater with blue eyes and red hair, but Lynch is otherwise an artist without a public face (at least to me). He died of cancer aged 53, but his inner life appears private, unknown even to the curator of this show.
Lynch may have started to paint on salvaged wood because he was skint. But the medium becomes crucial to the art. Old plywood, used planks, the top of a table pocked with woodworm: he found a way of painting on this hard and resistant substrate as if it were as light as parchment. And his brushwork, moreover, is rightly described as calligraphic. Owls, hawks, tangled blossoms, the pale discs of honesty seeds hanging like silver moons from skeletal black boughs: his art has all the delicacy of nature, combined with a swirling, stuttering, sometimes wayward abruptness.
Over the tawny warmth of old wood, he paints a rough blush of crimson to hold a stem of white blossoms. They materialise like a vision on the moire grain of the wood. Lynch pays attention to every nuance of the natural surface. His brush follows the flow or scumbles over the unfinished wood to let its grain show through as part of the image. Circles where a knot has fallen out are filled in with pigment, like twinkling planets.
On a stretch of blond board he paints two classical gods locked in mortal combat beneath a sequence of almost abstract swirls, dark with thunder, that repeat the rings of the wood while implying ancient skies. A green frog watches from halfway up one side, scuppering your sense of what is above, below and beyond. The wood has the disorientating dimensions, for him, of both heaven and earth, of outer space and Grecian sand.
A deer moves through white light, a morse code of fine dots and dashes, the red of both a roebuck and its blood. Only at a distance does it become apparent that this creature is turning its own head to throw back a glance. The skittering marks and the bristling foliage give a firework rush to this enormous image; the creature leaps, about to be gone.
A willow pattern cup lies, blue and white and bizarrely coarse, among the bracken and ferns on a forest floor. There is a brilliant painting of a mirror, just a disc of white, but exactly the right white, glimmering against the hardboard in another painting, characteristically without date or title. These still lifes, small and discreet, seem to come out of nowhere and yet to make a kind of poetic sense.
An image of a pomegranate, sliced in two, its ruby seeds painted an alizarin crimson that gathers on the surface like drops of blood, appears against a hazy, smoky darkness. Water lilies hover beside it, for no apparent reason; and above it hangs a wooden dish, decorated in gold on terracotta, almost wilfully scruffy in appearance and yet so expressive of the object itself as to be instantly recognisable. We are in ancient Greece, or Monet’s Giverny, or right here and now, somewhere in America. For this picture, unusually, does have a title and it throws all the emphasis on a ball of soft pale fluff at the bottom, the seeds of a native plant. It is called Still Life With Milkweed Seed.
The willow pattern cup is telling. Lynch loved and studied the art of Chinese watercolour, especially the flower-and-bird compositions that thread their way through this show. But other cultures are always there in the wings. One work in Brighton includes an image of a Chinese painting of a horse that in turn somehow doubles as its own ancestor from the prehistoric caves of Lascaux; three different epochs in one.
There is a quotation, taken from a letter to a friend in the 1990s. “I realised that the art of the 20th century is the fruit of personal revelation,” Lynch wrote, “while ancient art is the product of mystery initiation.” That goes some way to illuminating the strangeness of his work, with its peculiar combination of primitive joy and high sophistication. A huge painting of a sunset rolls across the hardboard in brilliantly controlled swirls, suave as any pop art riff, yet with a glory of gold, pink and blue that might have come from another painter standing under a different sky thousands of years ago.
The most beautiful work here is painted on five bare planks joined together to make something around the size and shape of a door. It is almost entirely composed in black and white against the hazy gold of the wood; like the colours of a Japanese scroll. Snow descends in soft, circling dabs. Birds, or at least dark avian shapes, appear among the silent flakes. Everything is descending down these long vertical planks like winter in some towering American landscape. It is a dream of a forest, painted on wood from such a forest: humble, organic, gentle.
Bill Lynch: The Exile of Dionysus is at Brighton CCA until 15 October
• This article was amended on 23 August 2022 to correct a reference to Raleigh, “North California”.
