Lynne Mapp Drexler was a New York/Maine artist who trained, mostly in New York City, as an abstract expressionist painter. 

Born in Newport News, Virginia, Lynne began her study of art as a child, painting fetching landscapes by the tender age of eight.  Later, after attending the College of William and Mary in Virginia, she immersed herself in abstract expressionism in New York City in the late 1950s and ‘60s.  Eventually, she reconciled these two interests – landscape and abstraction – in her late work of the 1980s and ‘90s.  But it was in the early abstract work that she set her foundation.

Lynn attended the Hans Hofmann School, studying with the legendary artist/teacher himself, at his schools in New York City and also Provincetown, Massachusetts.  From there she went on to graduate study at Hunter College, back in New York City, with another giant of abstract expressionism, Robert Motherwell.  In these early works of the 1960s Lynne featured color and composition, a fresh young artist seeking her own voice. 

From this early abstract expressionist perspective, Lynne’s work evolved in a fascinating direction, with ramifications that stretched to the end of her career.  Her painting became a personal challenge: to integrate her academic abstract training with her interest in natural subject matter – landscape – which she had enjoyed as a child.  Spurred by an interest in Post-Impressionism, a late 19th century style that would be of interest to an artist interested in expressive color and abstraction, she was inspired to apply tenets of both schools of thought, applying her familiar dots and dashes of color to an abstracted version of the natural landscape, much the way Signac and van Ryssehlberghe had begun in Europe of the late 1800s.  It was a natural fit for her.  While still concerned with surface and with paint for its own sake, two very Modern ideas, her new approach allowed her to distance herself from a strictly non-objective style and incorporate more of the landscape element that certainly exerted its influence on her once she moved to Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, permanently in 1983. 

On regular sojourns from New York City, Lynne and her husband, the painter John Hultberg, had been visiting the island regularly since 1962.  She spent the remaining 16 years of her life from the 1983 move, on Monhegan, 12 miles off the coast, painting and enjoying listening to opera and the Kentucky Derby – her favorite pastimes.  In December 1999, under the loving care of a close-knit group of friends who had formed a hospice group to care for her in her last days, she expired from emphysema.