Linda H. Post

Linda H. Post has always been drawn to the figure. As a child in Fall River, Massachusetts, she sat at the back of the classroom drawing portraits of her classmates and filling her books with doodles instead of notes. Her public high school offered no art classes, but her family encouraged her with private lessons, and she continued to develop her practice independently.

The coastal environment surrounding Fall River provided an early visual education. Located less than half an hour from the sea, the industrial city gave Post access to changing light, open water, and expansive views that continue to shape her paintings. Her formal education led elsewhere. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Rochester, a field that would later influence her treatment of figures, relationships, and the environments they occupy.

“I am a visual storyteller,” Post says. Across her work, women remain the dominant presence. She does not approach them as idealized types, but as distinct individuals with power, interiority, and connections to one another and the natural world. Her paintings frequently bring together women and girls who have never met, placing them within landscapes and architectural settings they have never inhabited. Although assembled from separate sources, these encounters carry a convincing psychological reality.

Post’s path through materials has been expansive. Her early background was in printmaking, followed by extensive experimentation across several disciplines. Sculpture taught her to understand the figure in three dimensions, while printmaking led to monotypes, which became her primary medium for many years. These works, often depicting figures in loosely painted interiors, formed the basis of her first solo exhibition in New York City, reviewed by John Russell in The New York Times.

As windows began appearing in those interiors, the paintings opened outward. Figures started dancing, leaping, and moving into exterior spaces. Post then taught herself to construct landscapes and seascapes capable of supporting this expanding visual world.

She later introduced soft pastel over the ghost impressions left by her monotypes. The pastels gradually became larger, denser, and more layered until they came to dominate her practice. When she built a studio with high ceilings, strong natural light, and a large painting wall, she recognized an opportunity to begin working in oils. Although the transition required adjustment, it was a natural extension of the accumulated surfaces she had already developed in pastel.

Post works consistently in series, with each body of work emerging from the one preceding it. The medium may change, and the narrative may develop in unexpected directions, but the paintings retain her recognizable palette and visual sensibility.

Ideas arrive through observation, memory, language, and dreams. At times, Post wakes with a complete visual premise that she must then resolve as a painting. Elsewhere, a face, sky, structure, stone wall, or striped tent glimpsed from the corner of her eye becomes the basis of a photograph filed away for possible use years later. A phrase from a book or a line of poetry may initiate a work or provide the title that clarifies it after completion.

Her compositions begin as collages of unrelated images, frequently drawn from photographs she has taken of people and places. Individual figures are removed from their original contexts and combined with costumes, birds, architecture, seascapes, landscapes, and invented skies. The disjunctions are carefully negotiated, producing scenes that appear internally coherent while resisting straightforward explanation.

“There is a dreamlike aspect to my paintings,” she explains, “a surreal confluence of elements that feels very real.”

That uncertainty is fundamental to Post’s narrative realism. Her paintings offer enough visual specificity to suggest an event, but they withhold the information necessary to settle its meaning. Figures appear on the threshold of change, participating in private dramas whose causes and outcomes remain unknown. The viewer enters after something has begun and leaves before it is resolved.

Post builds these scenes slowly, often spending several months accumulating layers of oil paint. She typically develops multiple compositions at once, moving between a large canvas on the studio wall and a smaller wood panel on the easel. While one surface dries, she may photograph models, prepare another panel, test a sketch, or write for her blog. Gardening provides another extension of this rhythm when the weather permits.

Music is nearly constant in the studio. Jazz, classical, world music, and new age compositions accompany different stages of painting, with tempo often corresponding to the speed and scale of her brushwork. Broad passages may call for faster music, while detailed sections require something quieter. She usually avoids lyrics, unless they are sung in a language she does not understand.

Her influences reflect the psychological and formal range of her practice. She looks to Mary Cassatt for composition and pattern, Pierre Bonnard for intimacy and light, and Alice Neel, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud for their psychological interpretations of the figure. Bo Bartlett and Odd Nerdrum helped confirm her commitment to narrative realism and surrealism, while John Singer Sargent remains an enduring reference for faces, color, and brushwork.

Personal relationships are equally important to how the paintings develop. Post usually works with women she knows, maintaining a direct connection to the people who populate her images. Her niece Hannah has modeled for her since the age of sixteen, and friends’ daughters have appeared as they moved from adolescence into adulthood. Other women have approached her independently about participating.

Post also values conversation during the development of a work. Her husband, Geoff, whom she met in college, has supported her practice throughout their marriage and remains one of her most trusted respondents. Once she has established a concept, she shares it with him and considers his observations. She is similarly open to feedback from friends who are visual artists, viewing criticism as part of the work’s formation rather than a threat to it.

Among Post’s most ambitious paintings is The Procession of Hope and Feathers, an eleven-foot-wide composition begun shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. The extended time available in the studio allowed it to progress more quickly than she anticipated. The painting brings together numerous models from earlier works and includes masks that were sketched before the pandemic began, including a plague doctor’s mask she acquired in Venice.

Its title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem and gathers several recurring themes in Post’s work. Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, only a few miles from Post’s studio. Because of its scale, Post anticipates that the painting will ultimately enter a public space.

Throughout the shifts in her practice, Post has remained committed to her own visual interests rather than prevailing trends. Figurative painting has repeatedly moved in and out of fashion, but the human figure has remained central to her work. Hundreds of her paintings have entered private and public collections, while selected works remain in her personal collection.

At exhibitions, viewers sometimes tell Post, “You have painted a dream I’ve dreamt my whole life.” The response points to the unusual balance her paintings maintain between personal invention and shared recognition. Though the scenes have never existed in reality, they can feel remembered.

For Post, this connection returns her psychological training to the center of her artistic practice. The paintings draw upon individual models, specific places, and carefully observed details, yet their unresolved narratives reach toward something collective. Within their uncommon spaces, private experience meets a broader subconscious, and the distinction between what has been seen, imagined, and remembered becomes difficult to sustain.