By Laurie O’Neill — [email protected]
Walk into Jean Lightman’s studio after a series of gloomy, wet days, and the rainy weather fades into memory.
In her light-flooded Umbrella Arts Center workroom, blossoms proliferate. A garden of mostly blue and white silk flowers stretches under the windows, and striking bouquets, gardenscapes, or single blooms cover Lightman’s canvases, both finished and in progress.
The Concord artist will show her work at the Guild of Boston Artists from June 14 to July 5 in a spotlight exhibit called “Radiance of Nature.” She was elected a member of the Guild in 1989 and president in 2014.
Lightman is best known for her still-life paintings of flowers, for which she has won numerous awards. She holds a Distinguished Artist membership at the Concord Art Association and Copley Artist standing at the Copley Society of Art in Boston.
Calling herself an impressionist, Lightman paints in the Boston School tradition, which dates to the 19th century, when a number of Boston painters traveled to Europe “to pursue rigorous art instruction in the historic academies,” she says.
“They combined the color and light of the Impressionists with the drawing and design of the academic masters and brought those skills back to Boston, where they taught. Their way of working,” she adds, “is considered part of the American Impressionist movement.”
Garden ‘divas’
Lightman began drawing in college, and later she had instruction in pastel portraiture. She began pursuing art as a career in 1976, taking classes and workshops in portraiture and figurative drawing.
In 1982, the Atlanta-born Lightman began 10 years of formal art training in the atelier of Paul Ingbretson, who was teaching the Boston School tradition at Fenway Studios. She recalls walking into his studio and being “blown away by the colors and the skill” with which one of Ingbretson’s students “had captured the light.”
Lightman is particularly drawn to peonies, which she calls the “divas” of the flower world. “They have dramatic gestures, gorgeous round shapes, and intriguing colors, and offer me endless opportunities to create captivating and expressive designs,” she says.
But the “fleeting beauty of peonies — the way their colors shift and eventually fade — is a constant reminder of life’s impermanence,” she notes. Lightman also enjoys painting hydrangeas, roses, dahlias, and amaryllis.
‘The dance of shadows’
Lightman is “continually awed” by the natural world — “the pale creamy glow of the light on peony blossoms or the dance of shadows across a sunlit marsh,” she says.
Painting, whether here or in Midcoast Maine, is a “refuge” for her. It provides the joy, she says, that motivates her to create work she hopes will bring “a sense of inner calm and a feeling of connection with nature” to those who see it.
About five years ago, Lightman decided it was time to take her plein air work “to a higher level.” Her exhibit will include a recent series of sun-drenched landscapes.
Making art “is an endless journey,” Lightman says. “The challenge of reducing a subject or scene to its poetic essence without compromising its beauty is an elusive goal — and is what lures me day after day back to my easel.”
“Radiance of Nature” will run from June 14 to July 5 at the Guild of Boston Artists, 162 Newbury Street in Boston. Lightman will offer a gallery talk there at 4 p.m. on June 14. The Guild gallery is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
