Lynn Golden was drawn towards her passion for art at a very early age. Living in London, she remembers visiting great exhibitions as a child where the seed to her future was laid. She left school and went straight into St. Albans Art College where the quality of lecturers inspired her to even greater heights.

Moving to Cornwall in the early eighties, Lynn took advantage of the governments ‘Enterprise allowance’ scheme which helped people wanting to start their own business by giving them a £40 a week start-up capital for the first year.

“I started off, like anything, humbly and worked my way up. Prices of paintings settle themselves really by your C.V.; where you’ve shown; exhibitions that you’ve been associated with; and steady growth with years of experience. Hopefully, as you improve more and more, so does the price of your work. Having said that, it’s all well and good saying ‘No, this one’s £2000,’ and then never selling it, so there must be flexibility. I remember the feeling of selling my first painting. It felt wonderful. When someone pays their hard earned money for something that is ostensibly just pigment and canvas and your art, it’s a wonderful feeling. ”

Her work at that time was mainly paints, but in the early nineties, a friend gave her a box of pastels that was to change the course of her career. Having won a French competition the result was becoming the pastel expert at paint-makers Daler Rowney. Her outstanding pastels have become her most successful medium to date.

"Six years ago I went out to Barbados to visit a friend and decided to go back each year to paint a new body of work...I just feast on the gorgeous light and colours that are there".

“All I basically do with my work is to deconstruct the colour of the image I have in front of me. So say, for example, the sky looks particularly lilacy or purple, I’ll just put down maybe some blue, green and some pink, etc, leaving the eye of the observer to mix the colour. I feel it makes the picture more exciting. And all my landscape paintings are done ‘in situ’ in response to the ever-changing light, weather and flora of the beaches and cliffs.”

Lynn has just returned from another stint in Barbados where she has started taking an annual sabbatical. The vibrant colours of the tropics have inspired her to include gold leaf in her work.

“Six years ago I went out to Barbados to visit a friend and decided to go back each year to paint a new body of work. Its’ a fantastic place to be during the greyer months. I just feast on the gorgeous light and colours that are there and it means that I can sell the painting both here as well as having some in the galleries out there. I find it also enhances the work I do once back in the UK and the gold leaf I find helps push the boundaries of my work even more. Barbados is now very much part of my working year and it’s a very nice balance to work there for eight weeks and then come back for the British spring.”

For a greater insight into Lynn’s painting or to find out more about where she is exhibiting, you can visit her website www.lynngolden.co.uk

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