2001 The Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, GeorgiaAwarded Fellowship
2000 Women’s Studio Workshop Rosendale, New
2000YorkAwarded fellowship – Visiting Printmaker
1997 – 2001 Johnson State College Johnson, Vermont - MFA degree
Vermont Studio Center
Awarded Vermont Artist Fellowship
1996 – 1997 University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
Teacher Certification and Studio Art
1975 –1978 University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont - MS degree
1978 – 1991 Awarded graduate school fellowship
Post-graduate work
1972 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan - BS degree
1971 Member of Alpha Lambda Delta (95th percentile GPA)
1969 – 1972 Xi Sigma Phi award (highest GPA for 2 years)
Alpha Lamda Delta (95th percentile GPA)

5 / 2003 Vermont Council on the Arts, Montpelier, VT
2 / 2003 St. Paul's Cathedral, Burlington, VT
9 / 2002 Flynn Center, Burlington, VT
8 / 2002 St. Paul's Cathedral, Burlington, VT
5 / 2002 Union Station, So. Burlington, VT
6 / 2001 Dibden Center , Johnson, VT
2 / 2001 Union Station, So. Burlington, VT
6 / 2000 IDX Corporation, So. Burlington, VT
9 / 1998 Rhombus Gallery, Burlington, VT
5 / 1997 Canterbury Booksellers, Madison, WI
5 / 1992 Trinity College, Burlington, VT
12 / 1992 Frog Hollow Arts Center, Middlebury, VT
10 / 1991 Royal Tyler Theater, Burlington, VT
9 / 1991 Champlain College, Burlington, VT
9 / 1991 Chessmen and Bem Booksellers, Burlington, VT
5 / 1991 Mary's Restaurant, Burlington, VT
5 / 1991 Isabel's Restaurant, Burlington, VT
2 / 1991 River Valley Performing Arts , Putney, VT

8 / 2002 Studio Place Arts , Barre, VT
6 / 2002 Triangle of Excellence , St. Jean, Canada
3 / 2001 Daily Planet Burlington, VT
2 / 2001 Union Station Monotype , So. Burlington, VT
5 / 2000 ISA Galleria , Umbria, Italy
9 / 1999 S.E. Art Hop (1st place), Burlington, VT
2 / 1999 Red Square Coffee House, Burlington, VT
2 / 1999 Broken Hearts Show, Burlington, VT
10 / 1998 Valet Air, Burlington, VT
9 / 1998 South End Art Hop, Burlington, VT
7 / 1998 Westmoreland Art Nationals, Latrobe, PA
6 / 1998 Union Station, Burlington, VT
6 / 1998 Art's Alive Group Show, Burlington, VT
6 / 1997 Firehouse Gallery, Burlington, VT
6 / 1992 Art's Alive Group Show, Burlington, VT
10 / 1991 Art in the Round Barn, Warren, VT
10 / 1991 Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA
9 / 1991 Shelburne Farms, Shelburne, VT
6 / 1991 Art's Alive Festival (1st place), Burlington, VT
5 / 1991 Mesa Gallery, Mesa, NM
3 / 1991 19th Juried Competition, Ingram, TX
12 / 1990 Passpartout Gallery, Winooski, VT
10 / 1990 Shelburne Farms, Shelburne, VT
6 / 1990 Art's Alive Group Show, Burlington, VT
6 / 1990 Vermont College, Montpelier, VT
10 / 1989 Artist's Collective Show, Burlington, VT
6 / 1989 Art's Alive Festival, Burlington, VT
6 / 1989 Union Bank, Johnson, VT
9 / 1985 Vermont Traveling Exhibition, National tour
9 / 1984 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
6 / 1983 Francis Colburn Gallery, Burlington, VT

North Hero Inn, North Hero, VT
Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
Mary's Restaurant, Bristol, VT
The Guild, Madison, WI
Clark Gallery, Stowe, VT
E. Benkert, Brooklyn, NY

Statement
I consider myself a non-objective artist but often end up creating work that has identifiable images and themes. In a way, I am painting puzzles that have no need to be “solved”— images that resist straightforward interpretation but nevertheless invite the viewer to participate.

The work represented by the enclosed images is a series of acrylic paintings on panels. I often switch the panels around as I paint, changing the order and orientation to find new configurations. The paintings are usually about 7 feet tall and about 12 feet in width.

My work on a particular piece is complete when I feel engaged with it -- no longer as the painter but as the viewer. I love paintings that give me somewhere to go, something to do—paintings that capture my attention and challenge me to make my own discoveries. I love paintings that possess a compelling charisma and make it hard for me to walk away.

Although it isn’t my goal to create images that speak a precise language, I believe that my paintings offer enough connections and references to give the viewer a point of entry.


Big Bang Theory
BY MARC AWODEY
Lynn Rupe seems to have exploded. The Burlington artist’s exhibition of five large-scale acrylic works at the Flynn Center’s Amy E. Tarrant Gallery is densely packed with thousands of lines and a universe of lively shapes that seem to have all been created in a single big bang.

The show is entitled “Kaleidoscopic Paintings,” and it can safely be called one of the most dynamic visual-art performances seen locally in many years.

But unlike the apocalyptic event that probably kicked off our cosmos, Rupe’s genesis has not occurred in a vacuum. She has been making large pieces out of groupings of smaller ones for quite some time, and her brand of abstraction is often biomorphic — as is true with passages in this show.
Rupe’s work is also influenced by art history, at least indirectly. The kaleidoscopic paintings are composed very much like Jackson Pollock’s pre-drip abstractions of 1940-1946. She works over the large panels she paints on with a series of brash, bright staccato statements, allowing little breathing space. Her colors are raw and flat, like the colors of the aisles of a supermarket.
Rupe’s 67-by-160-inch “M. L. Pandora’s Warehouse and Furniture Company” has a color harmony similar to Pollack’s “Circumcision” —- yellows, grays and reds dominate the scene. Similarly, her use of black and white outlines, which in this show are as wild as the rails of a rollercoaster, provide structure for a chaotic field of jagged forms.
“Area Not Photographed by National Geographic” is a twisted and flattened 80-by-153-inch landscape. Teacups on saucers float down a river and into a choppy blue bay, but most of the features in the painting are less comprehensible. Rupe writes in her artist’s statement that she is primarily painting “an array of images that resist straightforward interpretation,” and she holds true to that even when a few literal elements sneak into the picture.
One of those elements is a checkerboard pattern — a recurring motif in the works. It is very loose along the top edge of “Area Not Photographed by National Geographic” but more solid in “General Scrimmage” and “A Night at the Lackawanna Opera and Spa.” “General Scrimmage” also has jagged, saw-toothed patterns throughout it that form a nice counterpoint to the checkerboard.
The checkerboard is most prominent in “Family Terrarium” and it’s yellow and black rather than black and white. Perhaps it’s a subtle allusion to gaming, and to the notion that Rupe’s works are, in her words, “puzzles that have no need to be ‘solved.’” There’s a strong element of play and playfulness in the works. The more time a viewer spends examining Rupe’s paintings, the more new details are revealed.
Although it may be impossible to say whether any 21st-century artist can “boldly go where no one has gone before,” it is clear that Rupe’s paintings have taken a very productive turn. When Pollock’s work began to completely fill the picture plane with gestural forms, he became enamored with drip painting — a technique he learned from David Siqueros — and Rupe’s epiphany will certainly lead her into a different direction eventually. She is not the sort of painter who is content to rest on accolades and settle into production work. Meanwhile, it’s got to be fun to paint like this, and we all get to enjoy the ride.
Seven Days Newspaper, 2003 SEVEN DAYS is printed at The Press Republican, Plattsburgh, NY.


Lynn Rupe
By Anne Galloway Times Argus Staff
Lynn Rupe’s paintings look like the aftermath of a train wreck that was meant to happen. Her paintings are pure chaos. Familiar shapes are painted together in no particular order. Highway lines, bridges, ovals, staircases, railroad tracks, parking lots, and weirdly familiar organic forms all converge on large panels like a chutes and ladders game board gone awry.
In a new show, “Pieces of my Mind” at the Vermont Arts Council’s Spotlight Gallery, which runs through June 27, Rupe has displayed individual panels from the large, complex puzzle-like installations she assembles. The gallery, which consists of a conference room and hallway in VAC’s small office space, simply can’t accommodate her 13-by-7 foot acrylic on wood panel installations.
But even this small taste gives you a feeling for her larger works. In “M.L. Pandora’s Warehouse and Furnace Company,” Rupe intersperses the familiar – bits and pieces of the urban landscape – with a bizarre, kaleidoscope-like perspective. The black background gives the painting an ominous feeling, as though wherever there is blank space the artist meant to create little black holes. Sweeping parallel lines form highways, aerial views of parking lots, roller coaster tracks, ribbons of red and orange color, and staircases that go nowhere.
The result is a visually noisy image that up close seems to give the viewer iconographic clues to latch onto like floating dollar bills, a smokestack, a blue squiggly worm, etc., that are totally unconnected.
Back away from it and these smaller images become like details in a totally abstract painting. These multiple perspectives add to the absurdity and placelessness of the piece.
Rupe’s technique is purely intuitive, stream-of-conscious abstraction. She says there’s no blueprint, no conscious approach to the paintings.
“I’m not trying to paint a puzzle, I’m standing in front of a large surface making marks,” Rupe says. “I keep looking at what’s there and keep changing it until it looks done to me. I just stay with it.” She keeps working broad, bird’s-eye-view themes in miniature – staircases, ovals, highways, parking lots, eyes, figure eights – in no particular order until she feels it’s done
I experience it as though someone else made it . That’s when I know it’s done,” Rupe says.
“It’s Rupe’s self-imposed objectification, her conscious effort to create a disconnect between the shapes, their interpretation and juxtaposition that makes you feel as though you’ve just stepped into a horribly recognizable mess. Rupe has a way of making this melee of arbitrarily repeated nonsensical images seem like a metaphor for modern life.

Lynn Rupe’s “Pieces of my Mind” is on exhibit, through June 27, at the Vermont Arts Council’s Spotlight Gallery, 136 State St. in Montpelier. Hours are: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday-Friday.

e-mail Lynn Rupe