Lynne Drexler was educated at the Richmond Professional Institute and the College of William and Mary. She studied painting with Hans Hoffman in New York and Provincetown, and with Robert Motherwell at Hunter College Graduate School. In the 1950s after several years as a writer, Drexler embarked on a long and prolific career as a painter. "I could not stop painting, once I got started,”she said. 

Lynne lived for many years in New York City, where she painted and cultivated her love of the performing arts. She lived for a time in the Chelsea Hotel in its Bohemian heyday. She and her husband, the painter John Hultberg, bought a house on Monhegan Island in 1963, where they spent summers until moving to the island permanently in 1983.

She served as lay leader of the Mohegan Community Church and had a wide circle of friends among both the winter and summer communities. She was a voracious reader, and her knowledge covered a wide range of interests, from history to opera to horses. 

She rarely missed a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera or the Kentucky Derby. Her work was exhibited in galleries in Maine, New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu, and is in the permanent collection of several museums, including the Portland Museum of Art, the Monhegan Museum, the MoMa, and the Greenville County Museum of Art. 

Lynne Mapp Drexler died at her home on Monhegan Island December 30, 1999 following a long illness.