Fred Lynch is an illustrator and gallery artist based in Massachusetts who is also a Professor of Illustration at Montserrat College of Art and a member of the Illustration Faculty at Rhode Island School of Design.

His illustration clients include Random House, Viking Penguin and the Atlantic Monthly, among others. You will find a selection of his illustration work on his website under the heading “illustrator” under “commercial art”.

In the section for “artist”, under “paintings” you can see some of his gallery art, focusing on a series of coffee cup subjects, several of which are liquified funhouse mirror interpretations of the humble cup.

In both the “illustrator” and “artist” sections you will find a section called “journalistic art”. These are a series of wonderful location sketches, apparently in pencil, ink and washes of either monochromatic watercolor or colored ink.

The versions on his site are unfortunately small, but you can see larger images, and many more of them, on Lynch’s Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers blog, which is where I initially encountered his work.

I particularly enjoy his evocative drawings (many of them are refined to the point it’s hard to call them “sketches”) of buildings and streets in small Italian towns. He has an architect’e eye for architectural details, but renders them with a beautifully free line and precise but lively application of washes.

I love the way he plays with light and shade in these, note the white awning in the piece at top, and in the detail, second down, as well as the highlights on the steps and sheet in the wonderfully odd building with the central staircase above, fifth down.

Lynch often travels to Italy in conjunction with the Montserrat College of Art’s Summer Italy Program. There is a blog titled Drawing Viterbo devoted to the program that showcases some of the student work from the program as well as some of Lynch’s location work.

[Addendum: Lynch has been kind enough to inform me that there is a Tumbleog of his Italy drawings, and a blog that features his illustrations and stories for Paul Revere’s Ride Revisited.]