Excerpt from Lynne Drexler: A Painted Aria
By Gail Levin, Ph.D.
Drexler’s expression of her passion for music in her painting also reflects her studies in 1956 in New York City and then in Provincetown with the German émigré Hans Hofmann, whose Abstract Expressionism was a formative influence on her work. She found in Hofmann’s teaching encouragement to make musical analogies in painting, on which she would rely upon for years to come. “My ideal is to form and to paint as Schubert sings and as Beethoven creates a world in sounds,” Hofmann stated. “That is to say—the creation of one’s own inner world through the same human and artistic discipline. An inner sensation can find external expression only through a spiritual realization.”
Drexler recalled that when she lived in New York City, she went to The Metropolitan Opera three times a week. She said that she preferred German and Russian opera because of the drama. From 1974 to 1979, she focused only on painting abstractions inspired by listening to music, even making abstract line drawings while listening to music at the Metropolitan Opera or Carnegie Hall. … “people at the Met would get me score desks and I would sit and draw through the opera to the music.” “It was just the soaring, the gloriousness of the music,” she exclaimed.
