DETAIL OF AMY LIN’S “Hydrolysis,” drawn by colored pencil, is now on display at the Addison/Ripley gallery.

Kinetics: Amy Lin, at Addision/Ripley Fine Art (1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Washington, D.C.). The gallery is open 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Tuesday – Saturday. For more details, call 202-338-5180 or visit www.addisonripleyfineart.com.

It's hard to argue with the notion that Amy Lin gets more press coverage than any other artist in the greater Metro area. The current show at Addision/Ripley even brought out Channel 7's Alison Starling to feature Lin in the on-going "Working Women" series. It's a heady degree of critical exposure - and this for an artist who never went to art school.

That Amy Lin works as a chemical engineer is fairly well known. Less known is that she began studing the violin and piano in first and second grade, respectively. Ultimately, she stopped her musical studies in senior high school. She still plays the piano occasionally, but for the most part, she concentrates her artistic energies on drawing.

Lin's "Coalesce"

When she was first starting out on her professional art career, entering juried exhibitions as they came along, she managed to get one of her old drawings juried into a show by a judge with serious credentials. It was a drawing she did when she was 12. There aren't many MFA grads walking around who were doing worthy work at 12.

Lin is no overnight success story: she's been drawing her trademark dots for a very, very long time.

When she first popped up on the art scene radar screen, she made her mark with colored pencil drawings of winding strings of dots. Think of pearl strands without the connecting string, and you have the basic idea.

Most of us marveled at her handdrawn dots that came dangerously close to looking like computer printouts for their near-perfection. Some of us also shook our heads and wondered at the insane tedium of actually doing that sort of work.

As this latest show reveals, Amy's been holding out on us. Two swirling vortices-like drawings titled "Circulation" and "Hydrolysis" are from 2005. These drawings, it should be pointed out, feature lines reminiscent of flowing hair - nary a dot to be found. As she tells it, she would get frustrated, in fact, with the endless dot making, and cut loose with one of these free flowing works to blow off artistic steam.

We told you this girl had movement in her soul. Now she's hung the evidence on the wall for all the world to see.

The range covered in this show makes favorites, or picks for best image, difficult to make. Her enormous 6-by-4-foot rendering tiled "Regeneration" is certainly in the running for that distinction. It's a 2010 work done in the exact same vein as the two older works.

It has a slightly more mature feel to it, but all three are very close. She could have labeled all three "2010," and we'd all think this was a whole new awakening for Lin. With lines leaving the picture field, and re-entering at different points along the edge. She has well and truly found the edge. Amy Lin may not have an art degree, but she certainly knows how to make art.

Lin's traditional dots are here as well, but we must say her near-minimalist disconnected dot style is clearly giving way to a preference for interconnected dots. The work seems all the richer for it. In many ways, the connections are now more important than the dots themselves.

It shouldn't come as any great surprise that Lin has always been attracted to repetitive patterns. Music, chemistry, it's all in there. Lin doesn't draw dots, so much as she IS dots. No doubt it's why she's found so much critic acceptance.

The dot's aren't some artistic shtick. Art or no art, they're a vital part of her core being and what she's attracted to. Lin's dots are full of life and energy. We can't say

Lin's "Cellular"

"Coalesce" is another excellent work. Here we find dots used in positive and negative space, held together with connecting lines. At the top, it appears to be the winding belly of a snake. Towards the middle it seems more like a clot of chemical connections. And towards the bottom, the double strand becomes a single strand with long, spike-like protrusions that stretch out into the void in search for connection - but also serve as a prickly defense against the unwanted.

"Sinuate" is a complex network of dots. A somewhat central spine of dark brown dots runs through a wavy horizontal grid of light brown dots. You can stand back and see it as a river gorge running through a mountain range, or maybe as an orchestral composition with individual instruments running off the main musical theme through the piece.

And so it goes. To date, Lin's works are always definitive in their connections, but what those connections represent is completely left up to us the viewers. Then again, who knows ... she may still be holding out on us.

The Northern Virginia Art Beat is compiled by Kevin Mellema. To e-mail submissions, e-mail them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.