Written By Wendy Hobday Haugh
Photos provided by LYNDA NASKE
You only need study a few of Lynda Naske’s compelling colored pencil paintings to realize that the Johnstown still life artist is, at heart, a storyteller.
“I like to arrange items of interesting shape or color in a little group that says something I want to say,” Naske muses. “My favorite subjects are odd, interesting or vintage things, arranged playfully with a touch of whimsy.”
Naske often includes shadows and reflections in her arrangements, treating each shadow shape as an additional object in the scene. Often, she will manipulate the shadows to enhance what she seeks to say in her still life arrangement. “Sometimes I photograph at night using a flashlight. Then I can easily place the shadows exactly where I want them rather than being limited to where the shadows might naturally fall from a lamp or window. Other times I like the light and shadows at a particular time of day, and I’ll wait to photograph my group of objects until the exact time that the window light is creating the effect I want.”
The artist’s home is decorated throughout with small antiques and curiosities, placed together in intimate groups on different surfaces. “I find these arrangements pleasing and beautiful. I like walking among them in my daily life and noticing their different moods at different times of day as the light plays across them. I find it endlessly fascinating to watch how the brightness of the sun from one window will bounce on one little group and then travel along dancing into my China closet and on to the next area. I hardly ever change my arrangements because I just love them. I simply never tire of them.”
~ Mastering the Magic of Colored Pencils ~
Lynda Naske’s love of all things vintage goes back to childhood, growing up in the 1950s next door to her grandparents’ Broadalbin farm. She and her siblings and cousins never tired of exploring the old farm machinery rusting away in the fields or scouring the different farm buildings for exotic finds. Everywhere Naske looked, a treasure trove of intriguing old objects sparked her imagination. A line of old draft horse harnesses hanging in a barn, a Hoosier cabinet filled with knickknacks and curiosities, an Orphan Annie decoder ring long abandoned in a cellar... an endless supply of things to wonder about.
Thinking back, Naske can’t remember a time when she wasn’t interested in art. She didn’t attend art school, but her self-driven art education began early in life. “As a kid, I was always taking art books out of the library. I liked studying the work of old magazine and book illustrators like Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyatt, and Alphonse Mucha. That’s really how I got my art schooling: by studying those masters and copying the art I found in library books.”
Many years later, Naske bought herself a box of colored pencils. “At that time, my two girls were active in sports. Since I spent a lot of time trapped in my car waiting for practices or games to end, I started bringing my pencils with me. I’d prop up a drawing board on the steering wheel and copy wildlife photographs I’d collected, just practicing my drawing skills and learning how to use colored pencils.”
Naske’s main media are colored pencil and pastel pencil on colored pastel paper. “I like the delicacy of a pencil tip,” she explains. “The feeling of gently working on the paper with a little pencil is very intimate, almost sensuous to me. It’s a really slow process and takes a long time. I don’t just sit down and draw, start to finish. I focus on one section at a time, working intuitively, interacting with the image. Pastel paper is very delicate, so you can’t really erase. You have to proceed with caution.”
The artist usually begins working on a painting by noting the scene’s brightest and the darkest areas. “By finding the brightest thing—a highlight or something—and putting a little color there, and then doing the same with the darkest area, that kind of sets the parameters for the light. Everything else has to fall in between those light and dark markers.”
Because pastel paper is textured and colored pencils are just pencils, the subtle bumps are a part of colored pencil paintings, giving them a uniquely grainy appearance. “The pencils don’t really color over bumps,” Naske explains, “so a delicate textured appearance just goes with the territory of working with colored pencils. Artist-grade colored pencils are either wax or oil-based, so they can blend much more easily than a regular pencil and create many beautiful soft effects.”
Naske didn’t grow up in a home stocked with art supplies. Back then, she fondly recalls, art was that magical thing you did at school. Fortunately, however, her home never lacked one precious commodity: pencils! “Once, when I was young, I was at a family friend’s house playing. There was a bunch of kids there, so I said, ‘Let’s draw!’ They managed to find some paper, but they couldn’t find a single pencil—and I was shocked!” she laughs. “What kind of a house has no pencils? How could a family survive without pencils? To me, it was almost obscene, as bad as a house without books.”
Over the past 20 years, Lynda Naske’s paintings have won many juried awards. She belongs to five different art associations, exhibits regularly at the Micropolis Cooperative Gallery at 30 N. Main Street, Gloversville, and had her own solo show at the Mohawk Valley Center for the Arts, 410 Canal Place, Little Falls, this past July.
Thinking back over her lifelong love of art, Naske is grateful for the art education she acquired at her local library. “It pushes you harder when you have to teach yourself,” she muses. “You have to figure out your own mistakes. For me, those library books were a godsend. If you want to be a good artist, look at good art. Look at the work of good artists and figure out what they did.”
Feel free to contact the artist at
