The first thing many people are drawn to in Lindsay’s work is her immediately identifiable handwriting, a uniform system of scrunched sans-serifs composed of straight yet warbling strokes.  Lindsay learned penmanship from her mother, a career schoolteacher, who taught her how to make letterforms with the use of a ruler.  Though she no longer has need for a ruler, its influence is apparent in her script.  Geometrical, each letter an exactingly precise yet ever so slightly imperfect duplicate of another, so orderly and linear as to become strange.

Lindsay’s body of work, developed methodically in the context of local art-focused day programs, exhibits the same blend of rote repetition and handmade fragility that one finds in her letters.  Her early work was the product of intense devotion to a single color.  She applied paint or marker to large canvases and even larger assemblages of taped paper, spending months at a time covering and recovering their surfaces with tiny, precise strokes of pink or purple.  Eventually she turned her attention to everyday objects, applying the same meticulous colorwork to lamps and trophies and thrift store ceramics.  In 2019 Lindsay shifted her focus abruptly from monochromatic studies to figurative drawing, and began working serially with images of some of her favorite subjects—Dorothy’s ruby slippers, the Wings n’ Waves waterpark, a Power Rangers villain named the “Bloom of Doom”.  Most prominent among her subjects is the U.S. Bancorp Tower AKA “The Big Pink”, an iconic granite and glass skyscraper that stands out against the Downtown Portland skyline for glowing pink at certain hours of the day.  For the past 5 years she has been working with this small repertoire of images, spending hours copying each composition again and again as if she were making xeroxes.  Superficially disparate, her recent work is of a piece with her early color fields in that they are grounded in a process of insistent, orderly repetition. 

In recent months Lindsay has surprised everyone at Elbow Room with another abrupt shift in direction.  While still focused on making drawings, she has taken a sudden interest in rendering a wide variety of increasingly complex scenes.  In contrast to the single-minded dedication to highly specific subjects that characterizes the bulk of her work, she has embraced a newfound flexibility and appears driven to push her own compositional limits.  Her recent figurative works, with their fluid crowds and playfully warped perspective, reveal a uniquely surreal sense of composition that lay dormant in the minimalist linework of her serials.  It’s anyone’s guess as to where she’ll go next.

Outside of her art practice, Lindsay’s passions include the Oregon Ducks, karaoke, the 1990’s Disney Channel original series “So Weird”, dragon boat racing, and her family.  Her peers affectionately refer to her as “duck”, an homage to her vocal Oregon fandom as well as the consistent yellows and greens of her wardrobe.