Lynne Prather discovered calligraphy in 1976 when she moved to Berkeley, California. She was so taken by its beauty and movement that she started taking classes. One of her calligraphy teachers invited her to a week-long workshop where she learned to make a single-section book in which she wrote out a short story by a friend. She never looked back and began exploring various book forms while continuing to do calligraphy and to study drawing and painting.
Lynne benefited greatly from joining the Artist Conference Network, a critique-free coaching community that delivered on its promise to accelerate breakthroughs in focus, momentum and empowerment in one’s work. One such breakthrough was making a mobile from one of her unfinished paintings, which she cut up, reassembled and hung from a swivel, inviting air currents to make it dance. Seeing other uses for her paintings, she turned them into books, adding fragments of photographs, found images, and handmade papers. Her unique artist books were born.
One of her favorite creations is The Rilke Spiral, a walk-through sculpture with text from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke This work has been exhibited at the Adobe Art Gallery in Castro Valley, California, the Lexington Art League in Lexington, Kentucky and at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California.
Lynne enjoys sharing her talents beyond her studio. She was Artist-in-Residence at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where she showed adults and children how to create their own artist book by using images from museum catalogs and creating text on a typewriter.
In 2016 she joined Vision Quilt, an organization that uses art to empower communities to create solutions to gun violence. She has helped youth and adults translate their personal messages onto 24″ x 18″ fabric panels. These powerful and inspiring panels are displayed at community gatherings and have been reproduced as yard signs and street banners.
During the pandemic, Lynne’s main focus has been making cards to carry greetings to family and friends and to send words of praise or shame to those in power.