Arts Visual Arts

Cover Artist: Lynnette Driver

Lynnette Driver

After the Storm. Lynnette Driver, artist

By Gina Malone

Often, artists just want to spend time creating and not bother with the practical side of things. Creativity has been an integral part of Lynnette Driver’s personality since childhood, but, for her, making art has never precluded marketing it. “I’ve always had my own businesses, from painting murals to a children’s art studio,” Lynnette says. “My brain is split pretty much in the middle between right and left.”

Daisy Garden. Lynnette Driver, artist

She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and loved visiting the city’s museums, especially The Art Institute of Chicago, where she was influenced early on by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. The eldest of three daughters, she says that her parents—also favored with entrepreneurial spirits—supported her passion for creating, encouraging her career plans and paying for private art lessons. “Hours were spent dreaming up new projects,” she says. “Découpage, tissue paper flowers, candles, macramé hangers, beaded jewelry.” But even then it was not a mere pastime. “I also enjoyed going around the neighborhood and selling my wares,” Lynnette adds. An aunt who was an elementary school art teacher bought her art supplies as gifts—everything except coloring books. “She taught me at a young age that the sky isn’t a blue line at the top of the paper,” she says. “It continues all the way down to the grass.”

Lynnette earned a BFA in painting at Elmhurst University and took a job as a corporate account executive for a printing company, continuing to paint abstract commissions for friends on the side. “While raising my two kids with my husband of 33 years, I was a stay-at-home mom with art businesses that allowed me to paint while the kids were napping or in school,” she says. She also developed a passion for interior design, spending hours decorating and redecorating her home.

These days, she lives on a mountain overlooking DuPont State Recreational Forest. Hiking and mountain biking the area of waterfalls and pristine forest inspired some of her newest works. “The natural beauty provides endless inspiration for my painting,” Lynnette says. “Once I moved to the mountains, I was led back into painting abstracts, coming full circle in my art career. After painting impressionistically for years, I’m finding abstract to be really freeing.

Lynnette Driver

French Broad River. Lynnette Driver, artist

I’ve started using a palette knife, which is allowing me to work with more texture and also gives me the ability to delineate areas by color and line—a color blocking effect.” She painted with oils in the past, but has now begun working with acrylics and mark making with oil pastels and graphite. Her work includes landscapes as well as abstracts inspired by natural settings.

“My painting is highly intuitive these days,” Lynnette says. “I just get into a zone. I often don’t plan what I’m going to paint. I just start and let my subconscious guide me. My paintings, generally, are heavily layered with previous layers peeking through, informing the final layers. Often a painting will head in a certain direction, but the finished result resembles it not at all.”

Lynnette’s work has been exhibited at Art MoB Studios & Marketplace for the last four years. “Lynn has a propensity to indulge in contemporary art and is not afraid to push the envelope when it comes to texture, color and emotion,” says gallery owner Michele Sparks.

Find Lynnette Driver’s work at Art MoB Studios & Marketplace located at 124 4th Avenue East in downtown Hendersonville. Learn more at ArtMobStudios.com.

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