Lynn Weston depicts human figures with boldness and dynamicism but not with the static surface faithfulness of representational art. In her work they are integrated with a total and very modern condensed vision of the world. Her work has both a vigorous and emotional appeal and yet is able to suggest the mythological overtones of human life. She can render the poetry of light and motion. She has a skill for breaking up monotonous surfaces into radiant fragments which give mobility and liveliness. In her human figures she portrays drama, joy, pain, loneliness, injustice, but they bathe in an atmosphere of unwithered nature. Her human beings are whole, but condensed by a modern selection of essential details. Abstraction in painting has represented the forms revealed by science. It is a development which runs parallel to science. Lynn Weston uses it in the way it is used by the new novelists in France, a distillation of human experience into a form which suits the speeded up rhythm of our life and our heightened consciousness of its meaning. In Lynn Weston abstraction means a selection of meaningful traits to achieve what one might call the mathematics of emotion.

Her human figures have a core, an individuality moving in a brilliant air of heightened consciousness. She is able to portray, without ever resorting to banality, the theme of man’s inhumanity to man, as in Give Me Utterance. With montages, she dramatized the plight of the Negro. She is able to draw figures which arouse compassion without sentimentality of color or form.

In her gouaches she expresses reveries and sensitivity. The tones melt and become transparent but the lines remain delicately accurate, integrated, while imaginative and poetic. There is a care for detail which in the end explodes in a light, transparent, lyrical world.

She appeals both to the mind and to the senses. She is a painter of intelligence. The human quality of her work includes a knowledge of mutation and metamorphosis, growth and expression. It welds two elements rarely found in unison today, the human with the abstract, insight with lyrical ebullience, lucidity and reverie.

—Anaïs Nin