Toni Flynn

Their Place in the Song

2020

Toni Flynn attended the Art Students League in New York City, the storied institution where Jackson Pollack, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder, and Georgia O’Keefe studied. At the end of her ten years at the League, she won the prestigious Merit Prize. Before that Flynn studied Studio Art and Art History at Wellesley College. Flynn’s earlier work includes portraits and landscapes as well as still lives. Now she works in the Abstract Expressionist tradition focusing on color and line, movement and quiet, light and dark. She plays with the separate elements, rearranging them until finding the balance she seeks. Sometimes the process takes weeks and months; sometimes it takes years. “I work for months on the same painting, adding layers of color and shape until it looks complete. Then I wait. After days or weeks I look again with a fresh eye. I am looking for what is missing, where to add, where to simplify. Slowly the painting changes becoming more nuanced, more balanced.” Earlier Flynn painted with watercolors but predominantly with oil pigments. Now she prefers acrylic for its vibrancy and lightness. Through her painting she pays tribute to the painters Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, and Cy Twombly. Flynn has exhibited at Lincoln Center in New York, at the Katonah Museum, the Palm Springs Museum of Art, and in Normandy, France.