LYNNFIELD — Abstract artist Deborah Quinan will showcase her vivid paintings as the first presenter of the year in the Lynnfield Art Guild’s “Meet the Artist” series at the Lynnfield Public Library.
It will be on Thursday from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Quinan began painting in September of 2023 after being unable to return her work as a lawyer due to the passing of her husband. Abstraction gave her the outlet to explore emotion without any boundaries.
“I really started out doing things in a very abstract way because I think I just needed to feel free after living a life where I was a lawyer and I was bound by the rules,” Quinan said. “I was accountable to all kinds of people, but never really allowed myself the kind of freedom that I found when I put paint on a brush and applied it to a canvas.”
At the Slow River Studio in Topsfield, she learned all the basics of the color wheel, composition, shadowing and mixing. That formed the foundation of what Quinan needed to start her own artistic journey.
Quinan most often uses a canvas of 36” x 36” and 48” x 36” which she covers entirely with an undercoat of a color of her choice.
Recently, she’s added a technique she calls “throwing paint onto the canvas,” where she will flick small tubes of acrylic paint to create streaks and drips of color.
“I do that in all different directions, and I try to do larger streaks on the bottom of the canvas, and they gradually get a little bit smaller and then more concentrated in the middle,” Quinan said. “It’s really a lot of fun to start that way.”
Next, she goes in with a brush to begin layering her marks of color, starting at the edges to create a “muted frame” of just a few inches to give the composition harmony, with a sort of symmetry.
Quinan will switch between layers of cool and warm colors which results in a luminescent harmony. As she approaches the center of the canvas, she uses a heavy body paint for smaller marks, controlling the consistency with matte medium.
“One of the things that I was taught in an abstract art course that I took was variation with repetition,” she said. “So you’re varying all of your brush strokes, but you’re repeating each variation.”
While playing with color, Quinan finds inspiration from her emotions. She ends up remembering certain landscapes, like wildflower fields or the ocean.
She recounted how her piece called “Mountaintop Bliss”, composed of blues, greens, and lavender, had her thinking about a scene in The Sound of Music when Julie Andrews is singing as she runs down the picturesque Austrian Alps.
“The other thing about the paintings that’s really interesting is that shapes kind of emerge out of the paintings,” Quinan said. “It’s usually an orb of a varying size or a varying shape. And then what I do is I try to put a little bit of a glow around the orb as though it’s glowing in the sunshine.”
This glow that emerges from her painting is inspired by the work of her husband’s paintings of snowy landscapes, where the moon’s glow would illuminate through the branches of a birch forest.
Quinan says her art has led her to find community spaces like the Lynnfield Arts Guild, where she has been welcomed into a network where elevating fellow artists is standard practice.
“Lynnfield Art Guild has been really special because Cheryl and Kathy, the two heads, have been so welcoming,” Quinan said. “They’ve asked me to help out and that always makes you feel good… Everybody that I have met has been really, really nice.”
Since becoming involved in the local arts community, she’s joined groups like the Newburyport Art Association, North Shore Arts Association, and has become the Chair of the Abstract Artist Group of New England.
In the future, Quinan plans on continuing to experiment with throwing paint on the canvas, like a piece called “Hot Pink Overalls” that evokes the form and vibrancy of the eponymous garden garb in her house.
To learn more about Quinan’s painting, pre-register at www.lynnfieldarts.org for her “Meet the Artist” series at the Lynnfield Public Library on Thursday or visit her website at www.deborahquinan.com.
