Born in Sydney in 1963, Mathew Lynn is an artist best known for his portrait paintings.
According to the artist, his mother misspelled 'Matthew’ with only one 't’ and so it has remained. At the age of eleven his family moved from Sydney’s Lower North Shore to Queenstown in New Zealand where his parents ran a ski lodge for four years. The family returned to Australia and Mathew completed his final two years of high school at Sydney Grammar School.
Upon leaving school in 1981, Lynn began a Bachelor of Visual Communication at Sydney College of the Arts, but found it too restrictive for his artistic needs – the following year he enrolled in a Bachelor of Art at the same institution, but found it not restrictive enough. It was perhaps these experiences that led him to be largely a self-taught artist, eventually developing his own techniques for portraiture.
A keen musician, Lynn played in bands for a few years after leaving school and travelled to Ghana in West Africa to learn the traditional drumming of the Dagomba people. On his return from Africa he took various jobs, including making some illustrations for the Sydney Morning Herald , which allowed him to return to his love of drawing and painting. However, it was not until the following year (1989) that he made a serious foray into the art world, when his portrait of artist and friend Albertina Vegas was accepted into the Archibald Prize exhibition. It would be another eight years before he was once again an Archibald finalist.
In 1993 he was accepted into the Wynne Prize with a driftwood construction titled Humidity , inspired by his time living and beachcombing on the lower Central Coast of NSW. At around this time Lynn found work at an art shop as well as doing casual teaching and tutoring. He was Artist-in-Residence at Sydney Grammar School in 1994 and completed a Master of Art at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW in 1996.
Lynn returned to the Archibald in 1997 with a portrait of television presenter Jeanne Ryckmans. The painting earned him the runner-up prize (the first time it was awarded) and won him the People’s Choice award. His portrait of Guan Wei for the 1998 Archibald gained Lynn another runner-up prize. Lynn’s paintings have featured regularly in the Archibald since 1997; his Heiress entry for the 2009 Archibald was a portrait of fellow artist Joan Ross, wearing her kangaroo fur dress.
- Writers:
- Allen, Ben
De Lorenzo, Catherine
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
