Lynn Peterfreund has been working as a painter, printmaker and art educator since receiving her MFA in 1980 from Pratt Institute. Her work reflects her interests in both representational and abstract art. Her most recent bodies of work, ranging from pure abstraction to representation, are monotypes, drypoints and collages that employ a vocabulary of forms based on years of working from observation of nature, still life and the figure. The prints emphasize color, composition and personal interpretations of landscape, flora, and fauna. Lynn has taught at a variety of institutions over the past fifty years. Her work is included in hundreds of public, private and corporate collections. Her mural work can be seen in hospitals, schools, bookstores, museums, and homes in western Massachusetts and beyond. Her monotype animations and daily drawings can be seen at her website. www.lynnpeterfreund.com
Teaching Statement
I love language, verbal and visual. I am trained to see well and I thoroughly enjoy helping people see and think more clearly as artists. I’m startled by the idea that I’ve been teaching art for over fifty years but that experience adds up to a level of comfort and flexibility that I can offer to students. The breadth of my own work in printmaking and painting in both abstract and representational modes gives me the range to help students see possibilities for developing what they are trying to express in a variety of ways. In tandem with teaching formal issues, I help students identify and reveal to themselves what their most compelling interests are. Form and content, dependent on each other, are what a student and I examine together using a series of straightforward questions. My efforts are always to offer a student ways to ask those questions for themselves, see their work objectively and learn to better edit and develop their art.
Color, formal description, composition, and personal expression are the formal elements that I stress in all the classes I teach whether it is drawing, painting or printmaking. The greater depth in expression of ideas that students so often are looking to put forward in their work often requires their closer attention to art fundamentals: the basic relationships of line, value, color, shape or form, and texture. I’m helping students look closely about what is authentically important to them and what is accumulated convention or habit. This process can be filled with relief and refreshment or new ways of working.