About the Artist
Lynni Nelson emphasizes the play of light over her selected subjects and is known for her lyrical landscapes and vibrant still-lifes. She enjoys watercolor, oils and pastels, but it is the acrylic medium that holds the greatest interest and challenge for Lynni. She says she is “dazzled by nature’s happy mess,” in which broken colors and strong intermittent lights and darks take on a life of their own. I attempt to retain that energy while producing paintings that offer pleasing abstract qualities.”
Lynni comes from a long line of artists and has passed the love of art along to her daughter Cya.
Her grandmother, Henrietta was a painter and surrounded by 11 siblings, each an artist in their own right. This influenced her daughter, Lynni’s mother, to go off to the San Francisco School of Fine Arts, eventually hired to design Rose Parade floats, and then to a lifetime of painting.
Lynni started drawing while she was very young and started painting in elementary school. Lynni’s favorite subject is God’s creation — local landscapes, still lifes and ‘Fruitscapes’. She delights in the interplay of lights and darks showing contrast and adding interest on the canvas. As one of her mentors, Jerome Grimmer, taught her the idea of value contrasts she came to see that lights do not look as light without dark close by.
She loves people and art and was able to use both her gifts as a high school art teacher for 23 years — with her daughter as one of her first students. She first had Cya illustrate at age 4 and then has encouraged her all of her life.
Lynni, and her mother, exhibited in the Timberline Gallery in Oakhurst for many many years and had a three generation show that included her daughter Cya.