"Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that composition is the one thing an artist can call his or her own -- - that the way we put images and objects together is more likely to bear the imprint of our originality than the way we render or portray the individual things themselves. True or not, this idea has remained in my life with the persistence of truth.

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My large-scale interpretations of the western landscape deal as much with my inner landscape as they do with the outer lay of the land.  The process of contemplation and inner reflection sparked by landscape interests me as much as the beauty of the scene. While the elements of the earth  and sky are rendered according to observation, the normal relationships between them are often violated. I tend to treat the landscape forms much as one might treat still-life objects in a studio, moving them around and relating them to each other in terms of a guiding idea rather than a customary view or vista."

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Lynn Thorpe grew up in a small Wyoming town at the edge of the Black Hills. She has studied language, art, and printmaking from Washington and Wyoming to Australia and Canada.  She has also worked in a variety of positions, both academic and non-academic, in Canada, Australia, Japan, and the US. She became a member of the art faculty of Northwest College in Powell in 1984, where she taught 2D design and color/painting/printmaking design.

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Thorpe retired from teaching in 2005 to concentrate full time on painting.