Lyn Asselta
Involved in fine art and fine craft for the past 25 years, LYN ASSELTA’S extensive background has included titles such as elementary school art teacher, draftsman, calligrapher, workshop instructor, and creator of award-winning fine-art gourd vessels. However, at one point, she opened an old box of Grumbacher pastels and never looked back. An ever-changing life prompted her to sit down and evaluate what really inspired her creativity and made her wonder what she would still like to say to the world. While pondering this question, she discovered that the majority of her memories revolved around places?and how she had felt in those places. Images of fields of Queen Anne’s Lace and old farmhouses on hills, waves crashing against rock and fog obscuring shorelines, the sun setting over golden marshes and silhouetting ancient oaks, mist on the distant hills in the morning…these were the images that lived in her memory and that carried a sense of timelessness and endless possibilities. Having had the good fortune to live in places that offered up amazing scenery, from the salt marshes and waterways of Florida, to the Smoky Mountains of the Carolinas, to the rock-bound coast of Maine, Lyn realized that her life’s one common thread was her fascination with the landscape. She has always found herself drawn to locations that have a rugged, solitary strength, places with untold stories, and places where she feels able to lose herself in the nature that surrounds her. Pastel, as a medium, seems to be a perfect metaphor for her relationship to these landscapes… vibrant, expressive, exuberant and tactile; pastel allows Lyn to hold a piece of color in her hand and to capture the essence of the wild, untouched beauty she finds in the world.
Lyn is a Pastel Society of America Master Pastelist, an International Association of Pastel Societies (IAPS) Eminent Pastelist, and a member of the Salmagundi Club of New York City. She is the founder and past president of the First Coast Pastel Society (FL) and is a Southeastern Pastel Society Member of Excellence. Her award winning paintings have appeared in shows and exhibitions throughout the United States, and in invitational exhibitions in France and China. Lyn has had the honor of being an Artist in Residence for the National Park Service at Acadia National Park in Maine. Her work has been featured in several books on the pastel medium, as well as in Pastel Journal magazine, Pratique des Arts magazine, and Plein Air magazine. In 2018, Lyn published her first book, Seeing the Landscape, a collection of her paintings and prose. Lyn has traveled extensively to teach both studio and plein air pastel landscape workshops and she currently writes Saturdays at the Cove, a newsletter on life and art, from her studio each Saturday morning .
Now living in a small village in Midcoast Maine after 35 years in Florida, Lyn is inspired daily by new landscapes and changes of season. Her work is represented by Gleason Fine Art Gallery in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, Cutter & Cutter Fine Art, St. Augustine, FL, The Lucy Clark Gallery in Brevard, NC, and Maine Art Hill, Kennebunk, Maine.
She is a Unison Colour Associate Artist, representing Unison hand made pastels. Lyn also has developed four signature pastel sets for Jack Richeson & Company, which can be purchased through links available on her website, LynAsselta.co
