One of the most incredible things about your DDs is that they are a unique kind of diary - loss set against love and memory and adaptations and hope and sadness and future, all is a tone that powerfully sinks in and helps us understand the facets of our humanity. These drawings are poetic and beautiful and heart wrenching and quiet all at once. They are the exact opposite of the distraction economy of overwrought drama and screaming voices. I love each and every one of them, while I am deeply saddened and filled with hope. How is that possible?
From gab, April 21 2025
LYNN PETERFREUND
DAILY DRAWINGS
I love doing my daily drawing project.
It feels like “home” to me every morning as I sit at my big messy studio table and think about
what stands out from the previous day. I choose from what I did, who I saw, what I noticed, what happened, and try to draw those stories with feeling. I draw with the experience of decades of drawing, painting and printmaking behind me. Pens, pencils, inks, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and flash paints are the materials readily available and I often choose what I’m using in the other art I’m making at that time. I use lots of white out for spelling mistakes.
I started this project in 2012, so this is the fifteenth year of adding to the over 5000 drawings accumulated. I’ve never missed a day, so I can’t stop now. I rely on doing them to organized myself: to remember the who, what, where, when, and how of life, but also to understand what it all might mean and to record how it feels. Doing them is very cathartic.
With a vague idea, I begin each page with a wash of color or a few marks and improvise the rest. I enjoy my own surprise at the results. If I like the drawing that comes out, I’m happier for the rest of the day. And if I don’t like it as much, I say, “That’s how it came out” rather than revising. I send drawings to family and friends as shorthand communiques. I’m very dependent, and fortified by responses I get back. My late husband, Nick, was a big fan.
The most important criteria for selecting the drawings for this show was how they look. I tried to choose the best combinations of painterly and graphic qualities with the stories, humor and emotions expressed. But, essentially, the art had to be solid.
This practice began as a private one but has grown more public over the years.
When I started showing the drawings in galleries and online, it became clear that my personal stories and observations resonate with others. The mix of small moments, to do lists, humor and minutia with bigger thoughts, global concerns and fears on every page was what many people noted. Stories of life and death, family, aging, politics, climate, and wars meet stories of making art or dinner, walking in nature, travel, teaching, friends, and cat care. I’m sure that exhibiting and sharing these drawings has had an influence on how I do the drawings. I see that they’ve become more worked over the years and I’m more careful about sticking to my own stories and not revealing the private stories of others.
I am in the process of designing and publishing a book of daily drawings, which I hope will emerge in the next year or two. In the meantime, I post my weekly group of drawings at
lynnpeterfreund.substack.com, where anyone can become a free or paying subscriber.
This exhibition is designed for a quicker or longer look at the drawings. The notebooks contain drawings from 2020 to the present so please feel free to sit and look through them.
his show was how they look. I