Lynne McManus

“Are these paintings really real?”

Martinez Gallery artists invite gallery visitors and art lovers to test their perceptions of reality by seeing the Realism art show running from 8 November to 12 January.

One artist in particular, Lynne McManus, really challenges the boundaries of reality, resetting them to include unseen worlds that exist far below and beyond ordinarily accepted superficialities. Her non-representational watercolor paintings are left entirely open to interpretation, depending on what the viewer wants to see. They spring from her varied background of doodler, art psychotherapist, meditator, licensed marriage family therapist and baseball fan.

When asked if her own artwork is art therapy, she said, “Oh no. No. This is fun. Therapy is hard and can be difficult. In art therapy, you’re not looking for a painting per se. It’s to try to put out there something that doesn’t have words, something that’s really deep inside you, that’s perhaps unpleasant or incommunicable in any other way. The point of being a psychotherapist is to go wherever the pain is and work your way back with it, not throwing it away. It’s dealing sometimes with trauma, sometimes with difficulties. Art can be that too, but it has a different goal and that is to make something, not necessarily pretty, something worth looking at. Art therapy, it may or may not be worth looking at.”

McManus’s untitled watercolor paintings and Art Deco Gecko, which took two years to complete, are worth looking at. While sitting in a state of deep, meditative introspection, she paints, sometimes choosing a broad theme to consider, such as creation. The results are varied.

“I make a lot of mud,” laughed McManus. But, she also produces intriguing, non-representational images that stir up mental associations in the minds of viewers.