Lyn Whittle is a printmaker by profession and has taught junior and matric art at schools and a College in Cape Town for the last 26 years. She has lived in Muizenberg for the past 11 years.
Her art career s
tarted at Bloemfontein Art school where she majored in Sculpture, then went on to do Fine Art through Unisa. There she majored in Printmaking and History of Art gaining an Hons Degree in Fine Art in 1993. There was no printing press available where she lived, so she had to spend a week a month in Pretoria. Having a young family, this was quite a challenge.
She has works in major collections around the country, in a variety of media. Four Solo 
exhibitions showed a diverse body of work, mostly in mixed media. Many group exhibitions have seen her art take off to all parts of the world.
Being a semi-abstract artist, it’s sometimes hard to explain where the images come from. To back it up, research into different subjects gives her the springboard from which to leap! Working totally spontaneously is the usual option, but the base of knowledge from research and experimenting has a sense of “control”.
In the body of work for Peculiar V Particular, a series of 13 Pencil drawings of erotic plants forms developed out of her interest in pattern and decorative elements. None of these plants are real, but there seems to be a confidence of reality that the plants hold and bare to the world.
The idea of the Peculiar V Particular was developed as the drawings were being done. The 
peculiar shows the emphasis of “free thinking” and the notion of “chance”, similar to the Dada concept of chance. “Today, I put these forms together like this, tomorrow they would be put together differently. The fascination for me is that the ideas of today would not be the same as the ideas of tomorrow. Work done at a particular time could not be the same at any one point, as the thought process is spontaneous and the drawing is done without any planning or previous thought. The particular would be the actual patterns or forms I’ve chosen to use, whether it be symmetrical or not, detailed or not, sometimes not what we would normally find in plants; where a particular form is chosen to fit a certain area of the drawing.”
The peculiar is the choice and combination of different ideas in the plant form, where the erotic made-up parts of the flowers are intended to give a “safe, floral” scene, while the particular is the actual choice of parts that become a whole.”
Currently, Lyn is working on a series of prints – mixed media and monotypes – using old wooden blocks which were hand carved from hard wood and used to print patterns on textiles. “These valuable items are so basic, yet beautifully carved and used for many thousands of textiles, all printed by hand…. just so precious”.
Lyn Whittle, Muizenberg : Cell