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James Lynch was born in 1956 and has been painting professionally for thirty years. From his first sell-out exhibition in the 1980’s he went on to win awards and prizes from the Royal Academy, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Spectator. His patrons include the National Trust, the Folio Society and many eminent private collectors. He exhibits regularly with the Maas Gallery in London.

He became known in the 1980’s and 90’s for his monumental animals set in visionary landscapes, but his recent work focusses on the Somerset and Dorset landscape and its different moods at times of day, seasonal light and dramatic weather.

James paints using the ancient medium of egg tempera.

He mixes traditional gesso from raw ingredients and makes his paint according to Quattrocento recipes, using pure ground pigments, egg yolk and water. The paint is built up in thin layers and the surface hardens to one of the most durable and lightfast there is, with a sheen which gives a translucent glow to the colours.

"One can hardly imagine a more laborious, slow-maturing process. It probably accounts for the extraordinary sense of balance Lynch achieves in his work as though he is placing us at the still centre of the moving world."
John Russell Taylor, The Times Art Critic

James is married to painter, Kate Lynch, and they live on a hill overlooking the Somerset Levels and Moors. Their daugher, Alice Mary Lynch is a designer and dollmaker.

James has a studio which commands breathtaking views over King’s Sedgemoor towards Glastonbury Tor. His interest in paragliding provides inspiration for his paintings.

He welcomes enquiries, commissions and studio visits.
 

 

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"Born in 1956, a few months before John Minton died, the painter James Lynch is too young to have been affected directly by the work of that English school of artists which included Minton, John Craxton, Michael Ayrton and Keith Vaughan and who were known collectively as the Neo-Romantics, however in many senses he seems to belong with them. Partly no doubt this is because of his eccentric artistic formation, away from the normal art school channels by which the prevailing fashions are by and large transmitted."

John Russell Taylor, The Times Art Critic