Daily Herald opinion: ‘My favorite painting is my next one’: For 33 years, watercolorist Tom Lynch has warmed our hearts

Everyone’s Christmastime looks different. For most of us the holiday is family-centered; for those without family nearby, friends often take center stage. Some go to church and nonprofit programs, as attendees or volunteers, that offer much-needed holiday cheer and warmth; while some content themselves with quiet wintry walks in the brisk outdoors. Many people work jobs, spending the holiday companionably (hopefully) with colleagues.

However we spend the holidays, we can’t help but indulge in memory.

The watercolorist Tom Lynch believes that at least part of his job is to reflect people’s memories in his work. Nothing makes him happier than overhearing someone say to a companion, “Doesn’t this remind you of …?” at one of his shows.

“I like my paintings to be a rekindling of your story,” he says. “I want them to stimulate your imagination.”

Lynch, a nationally-known artist, teacher, lecturer and author, has been providing the Daily Herald with its annual Christmas card since 1992. Tomorrow, Christmas Day, our newspaper will feature his 2025 Christmas scene. He hasn’t missed a holiday in 33 years. There was only once, about eight years ago, that Lynch mused maybe it was time to retire and pass the responsibility for the Christmas card to another artist.

He snapped out of it. He has always loved Christmas, and at 75, he now has grandchildren to re-energize his spirit if it ever flags, which isn’t often. Christmas, he says, is joyous.

“I’m enjoying it all over again through their eyes,” he says from his Oswego home that doubles as his studio. “My glass is always half-full.”

Even Christmas shopping, with its crass commercialism, gets a thumbs-up. “Shopping is doing something for someone else,” he says. His home is fully decorated, the cookie jar is full, and kids are always in sight, what with Taco Tuesday and Pancake Saturday.

It’s not hard to understand why Lynch’s Christmas cards are gentle in spirit, a slice of wintertime, a slice of memory, frozen for a split second. There is always movement. You can imagine that if you blink, the children skating on a local pond will zip past, laughing. That the deer will dip their heads into the stream for a drink, and that the water will move downstream, taking a small iceflow with it.

In 1992, Lynch was a well-known local artist living in Arlington Heights, and the Daily Herald commissioned a watercolor from him that would serve as the company Christmas card. The scene he contrived was a congenial Santa Claus as part of a table centerpiece with apples and pine cones and green boughs aside a warm glowing candle. It was so charming and natural that the decision was made to publish it on the front page. A tradition was born.

Lynch grew up in Franklin Park. He was captivated by art early: the nuns at St. Gertrude School contacted his parents, concerned that his homework assignments were covered with drawings. He got placed in an evening art class as a grade schooler (he had to leave a half-hour early in order to hit his bedtime) and once at East Leyden High School, he took every art course they had.

“I wasn’t gifted,” Lynch says now. “I wasn’t the best in class, but I was the most determined.”

He attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago and then set out to learn from the best, driving his van to visit watercolor masters across the country. He slept in a tent in Woodstock, New York one summer to take a class from watercolorist John Pike, the master of light and dark. He volunteered to mat and frame the work of Nita Engle, a well-known Marquette, Michigan, watercolorist who illustrated Reader’s Digest among other publications, just for the opportunity of watching her work, “to be a fly on the wall.”

Painting is a solitary enterprise but Lynch is not a loner. Diversifying his career by adding teaching and lecturing, doing author tours and taking commissions and commercial work feeds his gregarious nature, and when he’s done he can settle back into his studio. He takes endless photos that might later become the subjects of watercolors. Post-pandemic he does less traveling these days and more online teaching. He has students from all over the country and in Europe, which he loves.

He teaches techniques and mechanics and encourages students to look at the world in detail. “I don’t see my backyard, I see long shadows and contours,” Lynch said. He encourages students to look at something “plain and ordinary” and see it as something special.

“What I can’t teach is passion,” he adds. Painters have to be willing to fail and try again (and again) when it doesn’t work, he says. “What would you embellish? What would you play up or play down?” he asks his students. The key is how much hunger, or desire, they have to stay with it.

Passion drives Lynch at Christmas and throughout the year. “My favorite painting is the next one,” he admits. Merry Christmas, Tom, and thank you.