Lynn Thomsen - Woodburn and Westcott - Nov. 14, 2001 - 3 1/2 stars

Thompsen's art is about where we are and where we live. Her pastoral, predominantly green paintings aren't just of the typically expected rural Boone County fields and southern country meadows, but of Eagle Creek and the ultra urban woods of Butler University. The sense of depth and definition in theses scenes is outstanding considering the swiftness at which the strokes look smattered, albeit intentionally, on the paper. Her true color farming fields carry an all too familiar feel that anyone who has driven anywhere in Indiana can appreciate. Thomsen is a skilled artist who fearlessly puts paint down, confidant about space and reality. Through Dec. 31, 2001. 916-6062. - Mary Lee Pappas

**********

Lynn Thomsen, July 30, 1957 - January 3, 2008

Thomsen, Lynn,
January 5, 2008
Indianapolis Star


Lynn Thomsen She passed away at 10:45 a.m., January 3, 2008 at the IU Medical Center, Indianapolis. She was born in Lafayette, IN on July 30, 1957, and lived with her parents in Delphi, until her graduation from Delphi Community High School in 1975. She graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.F.A. from Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. She went on to teach at Marion College, IUPUI, St. Richard's School, and for the past 7 years she chaired and taught in the Art department at Park Tudor School. Lynn was a landscape artist, and concentrated on scenes of rural Indiana. She has works hanging at the IU Medical Center, The Anderson Hospital, Women's Wing, and in the permanent collection of Indiana artists at the Indiana State Museum, along with many private collections. Lynn was the court room artist at the 1992 Mike Tyson Rape Trial where her drawings were aired on Channel 6 News and ESPN. She currently has a 22 piece show at the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, Loftus House Gallery, 101 St. Francis Dr., Mount St. Francis, IN. The exhibit will run through March 1, 2008. She is survived by her husband, Clifford Hull, her stepson Clifford Jr., her parents Cliff & Jean Thomsen of Delphi, IN, one brother, Eric (wife Carole) of Delphi, one sister, Teresa Holeman (husband John), of Charleston, S.C.; 4 nieces; Amber Cleavenger (husband Kyle) of Colburn, IN, Cassandra Rowley (husband J.T.) and Erienne Thomsen of Terre Haute, IN., Justine Holeman, of Charleston, S.C., as well as 3 great nephews and innumerable wonderful friends and colleagues. A celebration of her life will be held on Monday January 7, 2008 at 4:00 pm at Flanner & Buchanan Funeral Center-Broad Ripple with a gathering starting at 12:00 pm to service time. Persons wishing to express their condolences may do so by recycling. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Coburn Place Safe Haven 604 E. 38th Street Indianapolis, IN 46205.

**********

In Memoriam: Lynn Thomsen
by Barb Shoup Jan 16, 2008
NUVO



When Lynn Thomsen and I traveled through France together in 1994, she carried a packet of blank cards wherever we went and made sketches on them, which she sprayed with fixative and sent home as postcards to family and friends. I was fascinated by what caught her eye. The pattern of stones beneath the running water of a river, the peeled paint of a shutter were as interesting to her, as worthy of her attention as the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre. She made a sketch of me to send to my husband — not at Monet’s Giverny, but in the corner of a straggly garden down the road amidst hollyhocks whose petals were crumbling to dust.

“You were made to set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment,” the writer Annie Dillard said. Lynn was astonished by everything, and spent her whole life spinning her astonishment into marvelous forms, imprinting herself on the world around her. Art and life were the same thing to her.

There she is in the whimsical living space she created, a loft in an old building on 30th Street, with hornets’ nests, still on their branches, hanging from the high ceiling and birds’ nests, rocks, shells, geodes — bits of the earth she collected, wandering. There’s a fabricated steel swing big enough to hold two people that she hung in the middle of the huge room. A gargantuan blackboard she salvaged from an old school and mounted in her kitchen, chalk tray included. A cat stairway with a nifty bridge to a sleeping perch — because every living being was accommodated in her life.

Lynn’s astonishment at being alive shimmers in her paintings hanging on the walls: luminous plowed fields, trees mirrored in summer-calm lakes — the light in them as real as the light pouring in through the huge loft windows.

You can see the fruits of it in the lives of hundreds of students whom she loved and taught, and who adored her, instinctively understanding that she was not only teaching art, but teaching them how to be. Her countless friends knew it when, again and again, she directed our attention to some small thing that made the world crack open in a way we’d never have imagined and, in doing so, lightened our heavy hearts.

Lynn’s time in the world she loved was far too short. But the light she made wherever she went will live among us always.