Lynn J Rust Gallery & Studio

05/02/2026

Hi everyone, my 12'x6' mural, which I call "The Bunting and the Butterfly", was recently installed at Nature Forward's Play Space, 8940 Jones Mill Rd., Chevy Chase, MD. Many thanks to Alison Bidwell Pearce at Nature Forward for inviting me to create this mural for Nature Forward; to Sherwood Mackel for board preparation, easel building and moving, frame construction, and encouragement along the way; to Alice Sturm at Nature Forward for technical advice; and, to Bjørn Busk and AJ for installation!
Painting this mural with my hand osteoarthritis was made possible with the Sher-Hold devices by GRIPZ (GRIPZ.biz), which I'm holding in the second photo. It's painted on pressure-treated plywood using exterior enamel paints. The image on the left is a painted bunting with hawthorn leaves and berries; the Nature Forward logo is in the center; and a monarch butterfly on milkweed, its host plant, is on the right. When the oat grass and milkweed grow up in front of it, the work will be complete.

12/06/2025

Hi Friends, I just finished this 16"x20" painting of a famous glacier in Western Greenland named Eqip Sermia. It's an active calver, and likely calved the iceberg that doomed the Titanic. There's a vast expanse of water between the permafrost in the foreground and the glacier in the background; to depict this, I included a tiny kayaker (qajuker). Can you find her? It was autumn when we were there, and the permafrost was in its fall colors. There's a certain amount of thaw each summer, though that amount is increasing with climate change. The Arctic has warmed almost 4x as fast as the rest of the globe since 1979.* The people and the ecosystems of the Arctic depend on ice, which has become less reliable in recent years. I included the ghost of a polar bear as a statement on climate change, as polar bears are dependent on the ice for hunting and reproduction. I used pumice gel in the immediate foreground to bring the viewer into the scene with the texture of the landscape. The painting is inspired by a photograph I took in August while traveling with Adventure Canada.
*Rantanen, M., Karpechko, A.Y., Lipponen, A. et al. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. Commun Earth Environ 3, 168 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3

09/21/2025

A Fancy of Birds is on display in my front yard! I painted these using Gripz Sher-Hold devices (gripz.biz) over my paintbrushes to keep my hands pain-free. Friend and Gripz business partner Sherwood Mackel made the easel, prepared the boards, and did the framing and lighting.

07/30/2025

Hi everyone, I just completed my spring-into-summer art project. These seven 4ft x 6in boards, prepared for painting by my Gripz partner Sherwood, will soon be displayed in my front yard unless or until they sell. The birds (and the one that's not a bird) are inspired by my photographs from my travels earlier this year to Cuba and southern Africa. They were painted using our Gripz Sher-Hold adaptive devices (available at gripz.biz), keeping my arthritic hands pain-free. I hope you like them!

04/28/2024

I just finished my first mural! Sherwood Mackel set me up with the plywood panels on a custom-built, 7' easel. Each panel is a 4'x5' door of my new shed, built by Sherwood, so the mural as a whole is 8'x5'.

11/14/2023

Hi everyone, I'm delighted to announce that I'm donating two of my prints--Rubythroat at Night, enhanced with interference paint, and Elements of Surprise--both matted, framed, and ready to hang, to Nature Forward's Holiday Lights event fundraiser at their headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD, on Saturday, December 2, 5:30-9:30pm ET. I'll also be donating a basket of items with the Rubythroat at Night image and theme. This is the first time my work will be shown publicly and in-person! Come support this regional, environmental conservation and educational treasure. More information and tickets are available at: https://natureforward.org/holiday-lights-2023/
I hope to see you there!

Nature Forward seeks to create a larger and more diverse community of people who treasure the natural world and work to preserve it.

10/07/2023

Hi everyone, each of these five 8"x10" paintings is ready to sell! The blue is interference paint. Interference paints are not pigmented; rather, they are used on a black canvas to occlude all but the specific wavelength they're designed to allow through, giving the hue a shimmering appearance in the light. The orange is brilliant against the blue interference paint. I'll be traveling from Oct 12-25th, but let me know which one you're interested in (they're original, one-of-a-kind, so first-come, first-served), and I'll ship early November. $90 +postage (+MD tax, if applicable), framed and ready to hang. Let me know which one I can send you!



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09/27/2023

Hi everyone, I'm working on a series of small, 8"X10" paintings based on the theme of "Curiosity . . ." (the cat in the door light). This series has dog silhouettes in place of the cat. I'll post them soon and they'll be for sale, framed and ready to hang, for $90 + postage (+ Maryland tax, if applicable) each. Stay tuned!

09/15/2023

"My Bark is Worse than My Bite"
I was driving with my dogs from Maryland to North Dakota in 2022 and stopping to see friends in various locales en route. One of those waystations was the Northwest Angle, an archipelago known as Lake of the Woods, in the chimney of Minnesota—the northernmost point of the US—where friends have a cabin on one of the islands. While there, we traveled with another friend, who took us on his boat for a sightseeing tour of the lake’s islands. Since this is mostly undeveloped land, when we were hiking to see various sites, there were few to no trails. As we were essentially bushwhacking across an island, I spotted a half-decayed tree with a couple of shelf mushrooms that stopped me in my tracks. It looked as though the tree was beckoning me for a conversation through those mushroom lips. I quickly snapped a picture and caught up to my friends before I lost them in the undergrowth. When I got home, I painted this picture of those lips, with a set of teeth to match. I’ll leave it up to you what those lips were saying to me . . . and to you. Giclee print: 13"x16", image 11"x14"; $175

09/15/2023

"The Apparition"
In this painting, a split-rail fence and gate is the only barrier between the viewer and a tornado spewing a bicycle into the night sky. Almost everyone sees a connection between this image and the tornado and the wicked witch with her bicycle from The Wizard of Oz, and that may have been in my subconscious when I imagined this scene. But my intent is that the bicycle is an apparition of the ghost bikes that are painted white and placed at roadsides as memorials to bicyclists that have been killed in traffic. I would pass a ghost bike every day to and from my commute at what was a particularly dangerous pedestrian and bicycle crosswalk. It was at the bottom of a hill along a straight stretch of road, and prior to a fatal strike, had no warning signs or lights. My hope is that the viewer receives this image as a memorial to a beloved bicyclist lost doing what s/he loved. Giclee print: 13"x16", image 11"x14"; $175