“After great pain, a formal feelin g comes.” – Emily Dickinson
Pippa Hale-Lynch’s oil painting, “Grief: Self Portrait with Jam” (featured at the top of the page) has been awarded the Inside Art Award in the Art Renewal Center’s ARC Salon Competition.
It’s the largest competition dedicated to 21st century realism in the world, with over $130,000 in cash awards and international recognition through partnerships with prestigious magazines, galleries, and museums. Categories include Figurative, Portraiture, Imaginative Realism, Drawing, Landscape, Still Life, Plein Air Painting, Fully From Life, Sculpture, Animals, and a special category for teens.
UK-based Pippa Hale-Lynch was born in 1992. Her paintings use portraits and the figure to invoke intimate moments of solitude and grief. She uses herself, her family and loved ones as sitters. While trained as an Architect, she perennially returns to painting, using techniques learned over 12+ years of practice and training in traditional representational art.
Pippa Hale-Lynch, Harriet (No.01), Oil on panel, 12 × 9 1/10 in | 30.5 × 23 cm
Hale-Lynch says that “’Grief’ – Self Portrait with Jam” is the result of “slowly adding more and more jam to my face to see how far I could go to create something that felt visceral,” she says. The effect is intentionally jarring, and yet this feeling is somewhat mitigated once you realize you’re viewing someone bathed in sugary jam. “Friends and family have kindly been willing participants for other paintings in this series too, where I’ve invited them to use the placement of jam to express their own experience of grief. The result is a visual representation of the wounds left by the destruction of grief experienced by the sitter.” These works are intentionally jarring
In Hale-Lynch’s jam paintings, we know what we are looking at without being sure what to make of it: a woman’s face dripping with lurid red jam, but it looks like blood. It’s the kind of painting you feel before you know why.
One glance at the title though explains a lot: “Grief – Self-Portrait with Jam” depicts a young and vibrant human being seen in extremis, that is to say, in deep mourning. It’s a portrait of the artist bearing the ultimate insult of existence – death – while in the grip of the ego-stripping pain of loss. The self-defacement reads like a visual scourging, a surreal, contemporary equivalent of the most ancient expressions of grief, such as the rending of garments or the self-shearing of a bereft woman’s hair.
“I’ve had many people feel uncomfortable when looking at the jam paintings,” she says. Perhaps that is because they offer a bridge to a shared experience of profound, largely unspoken and quite intimate feelings. It’s paradoxical. The whole process, she says, feels at once “playful, collaborative, and cathartic.”
Based on the figure’s expression, the stage of grief in Pippa’s winning painting is the final one of grim acceptance. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” writes Emily Dickinson. The experience of shattering loss, the personal confrontation with mortality as unremittingly real, can pare us down to some hard and bedrock kernel of our being. With it comes with a strange sense of calm, what Dickinson calls “A Quartz contentment, like a stone.” We’re emptied of concern with the trivial, fearless in a way, because the dreadful has already happened.
An uncanny awe arises from this work’s collision of beauty and violence, not without a discordant hint of whimsy. What part in this does the jam play? Jam is found in the kitchen. It’s associated with comfort, delight, sugary treats, kids’ lunches; it’s surely one of the most mundane of domestic symbols. What could be more wholesome, more motherly and benign, than the thought of jars of jam laid up in the family larder? To see the domestic associated with injury, turned upside down as it were, is unsettling.
A second series of works incorporates figures suspended within water.
Pippa Hale-Lynch, Reverie, 2024, Oil on panel, 24 × 18 in | 61 × 45.7 cm
“The paintings of women submerged in water are of my cousin, a talented fire performer (again thankful for willing family members modelling for me),” she says. “These paintings reflect the feeling of floating in water with your ears below the waterline. For those few moments, we are simply a body suspended, with just the sound of our breathing to accompany us. There is a beauty within that fleeting moment that I want to capture.”
Pippa Hale-Lynch, Oblivion, Oil on canvas, 53 1/10 × 32 3/10 in | 135 × 82 cm.
Enter the SALON!
The monthly PleinAir Salon rewards artists with over $50,000 in cash prizes and exposure of their work. A winning painting, chosen annually from the monthly winners, is featured on the cover of PleinAir magazine. The deadline is ongoing, so visit PleinAirSalon.com now to learn more.
