Lynne Boyd (1953-2022) has been long admired, mostly in Victoria, for her arresting paintings and prints of the natural world which explore themes of impermanence, fragility and memory. In Lynne Boyd: Liminal , edited by Sheridan Palmer and published by Index Press, we learn how the artist’s melodic distillation of local elemental forms was driven by a vison and feeling for the wonder of all living substance. What distinguishes her practice from many of her contemporaries is a calm oceanic sublimity, which has the meditative effect of stilling the mind. Liminal is the first monograph to be published on the artist. It makes one sit up and ask why isn’t this talented artist better known outside of Victoria?

Beginning as an autodidact Melbourne-based landscape artist in the mid 1970s, Boyd met sculptor Peter De Garis (later her partner) who suggested she enrol at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). Commencing in 1980, she studied painting and printmaking. Although harbouring self-doubt upon graduation, her star shone, with her teacher Peter Booth regarding her paintings as ‘the best things to come out of the VCA.’¹ Critical acclaim and success followed with commercial representation, along with motherhood.

What really stands out about Boyd’s story is her feeling of ‘detachment’ from her Melbourne milieu.² An impulse to render visible hidden and metaphysical truths is traditionally a lonely path for an Australian artist. In a distinctly materialist and secular culture like Australia, artists who explore spiritual themes tend to be misunderstood, neglected and drift to the margins of the canon. Fortunately, we learn in Liminal that a conscious few recognised and valued Boyd’s distinctive spiritual creative impulse providing her with necessary encouragement and support. This important monograph led and edited by Sheridan Palmer is a testament to an ongoing belief in the art of Boyd and a commitment to keep her legacy alive following her tragic death at 69 in 2022.

As Liminal demonstrates, Boyd’s dreamy imagery of Port Phillip Bay and its surrounds drew critical attention through her lifetime. Its quiet formalism was an antidote to louder, more turbulent, socially themed art at the time drawing attention such as that of Juan Davila. Comparisons were often made with preceding Port Phillip Bay artist-resident, Australian modernist, Clarice Beckett (1887-1935). Beckett’s evocative and haunting works inspired Boyd when first seen reproduced in the milestone monograph Clarice Beckett: the Artist and Her Circle (1979). Over three and a half decades, Boyd’s visual language also showed a receptivity to international artistic trends and her practice indicates a diversity in approach and style.

For those unfamiliar with the artist, they benefit from the inclusion of several candid black and white photographic portraits of Boyd. A terrific selection of high-quality reproductions of works of art, mostly by the monograph artist, significantly enrich the book and point to her early experimentation and artistic development.

The publication of Liminal has the feeling of a passion project reflecting Boyd’s small but loyal base of serious art world supporters. Sheridan Palmer has assembled a team of eight contributors to cover the breadth of Lynne Boyd’s career. Beckett scholar Rosalind Hollinrake provides the book with a personal introduction. She cannily notes how in Boyd’s emotional and aesthetic expressions of the environs of Port Phillip Bay and its oceanic expanse, ‘she was only seduced by seas of serenity’.³ Hollinrake gives insight into the impact of the art of Clarice Beckett on Boyd, Hollinrake’s long friendship with Boyd as well as her perception of Boyd’s veiled fragility. Importantly, she asserts that the artist never emulated Beckett, but rather shared an ‘intense feeling for the epic dimensions and mystery of nature’ and an aim to make feeling visible.⁴ 

To demonstrate the multiple dimensions of Boyd’s practice the volume is shaped by a series of poignant short essays. These introduce the reader to the artist’s literary sensibilities, artistic approach, inspiration and milieu. Personal recollections of the artist by those who respected her, championed her and who knew the artist well provide a fitting intimate tone. 

This rich offering is presented as a softcover production and is handsomely designed. Published by Index Press, the front features Boyd’s Air, Cloud Sea, 1993-4 in restrained range of monochrome grey tones. The image is complemented by a simple black embossed title in seraph font. The subtle embossing and the wrapping of the volume in a finely linen-textured dust jacket is a sensitively considered reference to the artist’s engagement with printmaking.

Its eight chapters begin with Sheridan Palmer’s ‘Poetics of the Infinite’, followed by Tim Bass’s ‘Twixt: Lynne Boyd’s Sumptuous Moment’, Vivien Gaston’s ‘Intimate Sublime: Lynne Boyd and Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems’, Jason Smith’s ‘Total and Eternal Time: the Painter and Her Inspiration’, Kate Nodrum’s ‘Lynne Boyd: Aesthetics, Influences, Contemporaries’, Charles Nodrum’s ‘Lynne Boyd: The Air is ...’, Leah Kaminsky’s interview with Boyd ‘Dusk and the Fading Light’ closing with Palmer’s ‘Enigmatic Horizons’. 

The final chapter is an important bookend. Palmer sketches out a rich international art historical framework covering Boyd’s diverse interests and positioning her visual language. Under a series of subheadings, the writer covers the artist’s higher degree studies at Monash University, through to her engagement with text in ‘The Painted Word’. She covers Boyd’s fascination with Jean-Antoine Watteau in ‘Walking with Watteau’ and considers the impact of place in ‘The Forests of Blackwood’. Boyd’s comprehension of the infinite vastness of galaxies in ‘Mapping Stars’ and her appreciation of space and time and the ‘impossible’ are discussed in ‘Beyond the Liminal’.

‘Enigmatic Horizons’ touches on pertinent philosophical and literary references which provide further context to understanding Boyd’s art. Boyd herself cites the French writer, Romain Rolland whose term ‘oceanic feeling’ alludes to the ineffable and a sense of the profound unity of all life.⁵ Palmer concludes, ‘Few Australian artists working in the 1990s and early twenty-first century have explored the irreducible elements of land, sea and sky as poetically as Lynne Boyd’.⁶ Whether the influences be stylistic, philosophical or literary, the sensorial qualities of Boyd’s art -- its muffled auditory impression and numinous feeling -- is best understood as more closely belonging with international, rather than Australian, modernism.

Following the series of short essays, a useful chronology reveals Boyd held eleven solo exhibitions in her lifetime; all but one was held in in Melbourne. It reminds the reader of how her professional career was highly localised. We wonder: Was that owing to the combination of the disadvantage of being a woman professional and the effects of motherhood tempering ambition beyond her home state or, simply settled contentment? This writer wonders whether it reflects the broader challenge in Australia in building receptivity and audience appreciation for art expressing universal ideas.

A steady production of Australian women artist monographs has been underway since 1979. That this rich field of Australian feminist art historical scholarship has been active for nearly fifty years begs the broader question, how many other female artists like Lynne Boyd are there, still not yet better known? The writer suggests that the compound disadvantage of being a woman artist and a woman artist interested in concepts of the ineffable added to a localisation of Boyd’s reputation.

Let us hope the Australian art canon will expand and take seriously the ineffable as a subject matter, and the art of other quietly conscious artists like Boyd, will more likely receive the national recognition they deserve. Liminal is a meaningful contribution to the promotion of Australian woman artists as well as this wider aspiration.