Neighbor Featured Artist #5: Lynne Olka

Since my last column focused on an artist who teaches Greene County children, you should take my next pronouncement with a grain of salt. Sometimes art teachers don’t know what they’re talking about in deciding whether their students have talent. Which brings us to Lynn Olka, the featured Neighbor artist for this edition. Within our Northeast Tennessee community, Lynn is one of the most talented people you’ve probably never heard of. My hope is that the words and images you see before you will correct that situation and introduce you to an ‘artist neighbor’ you’ll be glad to have met.
Lynn Olka has something in common with Karen Fine, my previous featured artist, in that she was born in Buffalo, New York. Although she left upstate New York as a toddler, the roots of her art can be traced to her birthplace. “I don’t really remember this but my mother has told me my first experience with art came when I was only a year and a half old,” she says. “We would wait at a diner for Dad to get off work and there was an old gentleman there in a wheelchair. Mom would put me in his lap. He had pencils and crayons waiting for me when we came in and would guide my hands to mark on the paper.” A year later, Lynn’s family moved to Oak Ridge so her earliest memories and upbringing are those of an East Tennessean. Even before starting school, her exposure to art continued both informally and naturally. “Our next door neighbor was my babysitter. Her son was an art major in college and would sketch out in the yard. His mother would send me out with him and he even supplied me with paper, pencils, and crayons.” As she grew up, Lynn’s experience of art continued to be centered around her home life. Her father would stretch rolls of paper across the kitchen wall. “While Mom did the dishes, Dad and my sister and I had drawing sessions with pastels every night.” The creative support of her family was even more important by the time Lynn reached junior high school, when an art teacher, of the type mentioned above, told her that she was wasting his time and taking up space in his class. “It was a good lesson in following your heart no matter what others tell you,” she says. “He was wrong, of course. After high school, I worked for years as a general board artist.” Her skills as an illustrator, expressed through the print media, opened doors for Lynn into a delightfully varied career. She illustrated for coloring books and designed logos in New York City, did graphic design for a television station in Charlotte, North Carolina, and continued her general board artistry for a printing company in Panama City, Florida. While working in Houston, Texas, she seized an opportunity to attend an art school to broaden her range of skills. “Actually, I found the school while I was laid off for 3 days,” she says. “When I went back to work, it was with the stipulation that my schedule would be flexible enough for me to attend classes at the same time.” Although her work in the printing industry moved her creative focus away from the production of fine art, Lynn does not regret the distraction. “The printing work was like putting giant puzzles together. I created layouts photomechanically, built traps, shrinks, spreads, gutter jumps – all done by hand. It was very exciting!”
Design and layout have influenced Lynn’s fine art, and since moving back to East Tennessee and Greeneville this form of her expression has moved to the forefront. Her preferred media are watercolor and prismacolor, tools that are familiar to her from her work as an illustrator. She has continued her studies in watercolor with the well-known Johnson City artist/teacher Urban Bird. Through her association with James-Ben: Studio & Gallery Art Center, Lynn was commissioned to do a portrait series focused on ‘Soldiers of the Tennessee Valley’, including such subjects as Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, John Hunt Morgan, and Captain Tod Carter, portrayed through the vehicle of ‘story portraits’, in which the background is a painted collage of scenes from the subject’s life. Prints from the series are available at the gallery, signed and numbered in limited edition. “The commission plus my current studies really forced me to concentrate on portraits,” she says. “Not just technically but in theory – defining for myself what makes a portrait good.” In addition to human subjects, she also paints portraits of birds and animals “because I love them. I don’t just do generic representations but paint them as the individuals they are.”
With her varied career, both technically and geographically, Lynn names Tennessee as her favorite living space and credits its mountains, woods and wildlife, streams and waterfalls with awakening the fine art she now creates. Her current project is a series of Andrew Johnson, done in cooperation with the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, with story lines with the composition done in both sepia tone and full color. The technique is a further exploration of the process she began with her ‘Soldiers’ series. “I want the audience to be inspired to look more deeply at the portrait and understand the symbols within it,” she says. “For personal portraits of people and animals I want the viewer to look at the painting and recall fond memories and experiences of places and things that are emotionally meaningful.” Future plans include series on both the Southeastern Indian tribes and the Civil War with images of Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant. She has added oil painting to her repertoire and would like to further develop her three dimensional skills with carvings (such as her cardinal in relief) to enhance her painting and to create frames to complement them. “I paint because I have to,” she says. “My time spent painting is when I’m most at peace with the world.”
Lynn Olka’s art is carried locally and proudly displayed at James-Ben: Studio & Gallery Art Center.