Unframed Etching on Paper

by Anne Lyman Powers

  Anne Lyman Powers began painting at age 16, and throughout the 20th century developed a style that combines realism and abstraction with a dash of surrealistic allegory. A mid-century Boston Expressionist—America’s artistic descendants of the European Expressionists—Powers used her mastery of the figure to evoke emotional states, focusing on both recognizable subject matter and the physical qualities of the work of art itself, including composition, color, and texture. Continually inspired by the world around her, Powers also created idyllic images of the New England seaside, poetically recasting everyday scenes in various two-dimensional mediums. The recipe at the core of her work, Powers has said, is “a bit of Surrealism, a bit of Pop, a bit of Abstract Expressionism.”