Teaching with Mathew Lynn — A Philosophy

There is a moment in every artist's development when skill becomes the obstacle. You have learned enough to execute, but execution has begun to replace discovery. The hand moves with confidence, but the work has stopped surprising you. This is not a failure — it is an invitation. And it is often where the most interesting work begins.

I know this moment intimately, because I have been through it myself. My contemporary practice required me to de-skill deliberately — to loosen the grip of what I knew how to do in order to find what I actually needed to do. It is one of the most uncomfortable and most liberating things an artist can experience. I talk about this with my students not to alarm them, but to normalise it. Skill is a continuum, not a destination. And crucially, skill level is not who you are.

On what teaching is actually for

I do not teach syllabus. I do not have a method I want you to adopt, or an aesthetic I want you to inhabit. What I want — and this is all I really want — is to connect and to offer richness. To help you see what is already present in you, and to give you the tools, the context and the freedom to bring it forward.

This means that every student I work with receives something different, because every student is different. A beginner and an advanced painter sitting in the same room are not at different points on the same road — they are on different roads entirely, and my job is to find each of them where they actually are.

I should say something honest here. When I meet someone — in the studio, in the teaching room, anywhere — I receive an immediate and overwhelming impression of who they are. Their particular quality, their individual way of being in the world. I have no choice over this and cannot control it. It is simply how I experience people.

It is also, I now understand, why portrait painting came so naturally to me. And why teaching does too. What I do with a portrait subject — receive them completely, perceive what is uniquely them, and reflect it back through paint — is not so different from what I do with a student. I meet you where you are because I cannot help but perceive where you are.

I genuinely do not mind who I teach in terms of skill level. A beginner's natural visual language hasn't yet been obscured by habit and wrong turns. In some ways that is a gift. What I am looking for in any student is not their skill level but their nature — their way of seeing, their instincts, their relationship to the visual world. Skill supports this. It never replaces it.

On presence

Before technique, before colour, before composition — presence.

The quality of your presence while you work is directly reflected in your work. This is not a mystical claim, it is a practical one. When the analytical mind is narrating — judging, comparing, second-guessing — the work tightens. When you are genuinely present, working in a state of what I think of as endless play, the work opens up. Your natural visual language begins to speak.

Making art is about saying good morning and welcome to this state of mind every day. Practising this is as important as any technical skill. A significant part of what I do in the studio is helping people to identify what their mind is actually doing while they paint, and finding the tricks that cut through what can feel like days and even weeks of struggle — often the solution is so simple.

Your work is not just a painting. It is a document of your state of mind — an imprint and residue of your presence. First, we need to be present as ART. Everything else follows naturally from that.

On directness

Directness is both a philosophy and a technique, and for me they are inseparable.

Technically, directness means taking the most efficient path to the result — using the right pigment, the right brush, the right amount of paint, without unnecessary steps between intention and mark. The wisdom needs to be in the brush. Not in a theory about the brush, not in a system applied to the brush (and not necessarily in endless values mixed with a palette knife) — in the brush itself, through accumulated embodied knowledge. Directness also has a time dimension — we should work on something for exactly the amount of time it needs, no more. I often talk about speed when working — this is absolutely not about being fast for its own sake, it is a direct path to your flow state.

Philosophically, when looking, directness means seeing what is actually there rather than what you think is there. It means asking not "what does the colour wheel tell me?" but "what pigments are actually in that thing?" It means trusting optical experience over received ideas.

In the context of technique and technical knowledge, this connects me to a lineage I carry with great respect — the Australian Tonalists, who revered Velazquez for exactly this quality of direct optical truth. I absorbed this not through formal study but through a dear friend who studied under one of Max Meldrum's students. It produced one of our greatest painters in Clarice Beckett. I do not teach their dogma — I learned from their orientation.

But directness has another dimension entirely — one that is equally important, and perhaps closer to the artist I originally am. For the expressive or abstract painter, directness is not about seeing just what is there, but responding to what is arising — whether from an external stimulus transformed through feeling and impulse, or from pure internal process. In either case the analytical mind steps back, and something more immediate takes over.

These are not opposing approaches. They are two expressions of the same fundamental directness — a refusal to let the analytical, narrating mind come between experience and mark. Whether you are standing before a subject trying to see it truly, or standing before a blank canvas trying to respond truly, the enemy is the same: the gap between what is actually happening and what you think should be happening.

But there is a third dimension of directness that portrait painting revealed to me — one that goes beyond technique and beyond observation into pure experience. When you sit with a subject, three things happen in rapid succession that I think of as simultaneous shocks: first, someone in front of you exists. Second, you also exist. And most shocking of all — there is no substantial basis for either. We simply replay this strange pleasure, again and again, in the act of looking and being looked at.

This is directness at its most essential — the unmediated encounter between two presences. No system, no theory, no intermediary. Just the radical fact of mutual existence that has absolutely no substantial basis, and the painting that emerges from it.

It is also, I have come to understand, what teaching is. The same encounter, the same shocks, the same strange pleasure — but the canvas is replaced by another person's creative life.

Directness also means I will never waste your time. I move quickly to what each individual actually needs. Within a session I instantly come to where you are — finding the specific blockage, the particular habit, the unique opportunity. This is not a generic teaching environment. It is a highly specific one, even when the room is full.

On the research

I carry with me at all times a living archive of nearly 200,000 images spanning all cultures and all periods of human visual history, with a special but not exclusive focus on painting (all) — from the tomb of Amenhotep III to the Fayum portraits of ancient Egypt, to the Dunhuang Buddhist cave paintings of Central Asia, from the Chan masters of China (and Chan-like masters across Asia and time) to the most urgent contemporary practice happening right now. I have spent years building this not as an academic exercise but out of necessity. I am an autodidact by nature, and I needed to survey the whole territory before I could feel truly oriented within it.

I have reached that surveying position.

What this means in the teaching room is that wherever a student is working — whatever subject, whatever medium, whatever level of experience — I can place their work instantly in conversation with the full sweep of human visual culture. A student struggling with the rhythm of water can encounter Hiroshige. A student finding their way into abstraction can meet Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, or a Tang dynasty literati ink painter primarily concerned with spirit, not appearance. A student working on flesh tones can stand beside Velazquez at the canvas of Las Meninas — I have a 254 megabyte file of that painting that renders every brushstroke at the level of the linen weave — and this single painting contains an entire corpus of knowledge.

The research collapses time into the 'permanent present', and makes the entire history of painting present and available — in the room, in the moment, for you specifically. It changes everything about what a teaching session can be.

On the disciplines

Still Life, Scapes, Portraits, Abstraction — these are not separate subjects. They are a single circular conversation, and each deepens your understanding of the others. Think of them as four dimensions of a complete visual life: Objects, Space, Being, Openness. You need all four to see fully — and to paint freely.

Still Life → Scapes → Portraits → Abstraction → Still Life

In practical terms, Still Life teaches you the rendering of objects — surfaces, textures, the weight of things in space. This understanding will distinguish the way you see the upper and lower parts of a tree in space. Portraits require a precision in the interrelated scale of shapes and features that will sharpen your control in every other discipline. Abstraction opens you to interpretation and transformation that will allow your Still Life to become more than merely descriptive. And so it continues.

This is why my term classes carry nominal titles — Portraits, Still Life, Scapes — but in practice anyone can work on anything in any of them. The titles are entry points. What you are actually entering is a single, interconnected conversation about painting.

On process

Very often we make breakthroughs in our work that are not immediately apparent. We begin to understand them in time — sometimes we have to catch up with them.

This is where process work becomes essential. A string of process sketches and colour studies can capture and identify specific solutions spread amongst them, aimed at solving all the aspects of a major work. Versions of versions can help you understand simplification and minimalism, the essence — what is important rises to the surface. Process-based abstraction is also a wonderful way to bring you to a non-analytical state with your work — for some artists this surrender to automatism is not a tool but the entire practice, a direct channel to what cannot be planned or predicted.

Thinking that you have to solve an entire work on one canvas is often the enemy of working in your natural state. This can hold you up for days, weeks, even months. Dropping into your sketchbook or doing a colour process work when you feel stuck is the most efficient way through.

I also think of completion as always open-ended. Something is brought to rest that is nevertheless always on a continuum. A work may start with a number of parts to make it comprehensible, but it must become a single entity and unique experience — a 'One'. We create space for the viewer to inhabit our work in any way that is useful for them.

On what you will leave with

Not my way of working. Not my aesthetic. Not my mark.

Your own — clarified, strengthened, more fully understood and more freely expressed than when you arrived.

I have been a finalist in the Archibald Prize eighteen times. I have painted governors, chief justices, vice-chancellors and cultural figures of national significance. My paintings are held in the National Portrait Gallery, NSW Government House, the Supreme Court of New South Wales. I have spent thirty-five years at the highest level of this practice.

I tell you this not to impress but to reassure. When you work with me, you are working with someone who has genuinely been through it — the full range of what painting demands and what it gives. I know the fear, the breakthroughs, the de-skilling, the reinvention. I am living all of it right now in my own contemporary practice.

That is what I bring into the room. And all I want to do with it is connect, and offer richness.