Margaret Lazzari Art

Color combinations are important in my paintings.  Some color groupings can create the appearance of luminosity.  Or they can suggest forms, like waves, leaves or wings. Color moves my eye around the painting as I work on it.

All that luminosity, form and movement fill the physical space of the paintings.  It is the space of color.

When I go into the studio, the media world often comes with me.  What I have read on the news or seen on the internet is still in my head, and it can shape my emotional state, ranging from agitation to inspiration and more.  Sometimes I use the space of painting to sort through some conflict or feeling, with foreground activity sit on top of background continuity.  The paintings become about the shifting thoughts versus what endures.

My studio has big windows with garden views.  Those views are exactly the opposite of the energy in my head.  They are the concrete, lived reality.  Over the course of weeks while I work on the paintings, they also enter into the color space there.

I made these paintings during a period of considerable upheaval and media agitation. I think of them as separate spaces for one's mind to meditate, make free associations, work through conflicts, find patterns, trace movements, and revel in new color combinations.

Like my previous paintings, these new works are about the space around us, which metaphorically references the space of our interior selves. They are “Breathing Spaces.”

I think a sense of movement, transformation, and luminosity is strong in most of these works. Many were started during the dimming days of autumn, and became about the return of light.

GEORGE BILLIS GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

June 16 - August 15, 2020

PRESS RELEASE JUNE 2020

GBGLA is pleased to present Vastness, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Margaret Lazzari. The exhibition features six of the artist’s large scale abstract paintings and eleven small and medium works.

In this new body of work, Margaret Lazzari continues her exploration of the natural world - this time looking to capture the dynamic and at times unstable soul of water, sky, and earth. Luminous but earthly, these paintings are grounded in a sort of magical landscape: shafts of rich burnt oranges cut through soft violets, a riot of blues swim across the surface, shades of cream and white with hints of a whole spectrum of colors flow like a lazy river down the canvas.

Horizon lines hover at the edges of compositions - creating vast spaces where Lazzari pushes her gestural mark making to capture the essence of a landscape. Forged through Lazzari’s meticulous manipulation of paint, there is a buoyant freedom to the gestures that belie the careful thought that goes into each mark on the canvas. Although the paint is not thickly applied, there is a depth to the strokes, a texture that speaks to clouds, rocks, earth, ripples of water, and perhaps most importantly, rays of light. Lazzari’s work is a contemporary nod to the Hudson River School and American Luminist painters whose landscapes were attempts to convey the sublime and who were highly cognizant of the power of light to evoke emotion.

Lazzari also takes great inspiration in the physical and visual properties of the water. It is shapeless but it has weight and force and it bends light in the most mesmerizing ways. In these paintings, Lazzari is mimicking what happens when water shatters light into a dazzling rainbow of colors: she captures the deepest of blues, the random specks of yellow, the dappled glimmers of green.

The fluid, eternal motion of Lazzari’s brush strokes are not contained by the edge of the canvas and seem to extend into the vast beyond. One can lose oneself over a horizon line in the distance. The viewer is pulled in by hints of what could be representational and is then spun into an exploration of a surface and into a journey through the painting that transcends realism and evokes a personal journey through an internal landscape.

These paintings are based on patterns found in land, water, and sky. The spaces are somewhat familiar – there may be a sky, horizon, and land – but then things shift, and what may have been sky becomes water.  With the next look, everything may change again.

Fundamentally, my paintings are about us as humans in the vast physical world. They are about the marvel of existence as well as the unknown around us. They also relate to our inner being, which is fluid and creative.

All paintings in the Horizon series emphasize a feeling of space and light.  Most of them also have visual references to water or sky.  The paint strokes strongly suggest movement.

My abstract landscapes convey the density of matter, the luminosity of voids, and movement.  Some paintings are more literal landscapes while others only suggest an open environment.  All of them, though, allude to the space around us and within us.  Both spaces are vast and at the same time transitory and ever-changing.

They are influenced by the history of landcape art, especially those expressing transcendence, like paintings from the Hudson River school, the American luminist painters of the late 1800s, or the photographs of Ansel Adams.  All suggest landscape paintings do more than just record surface features; they also convey our own moods, attitudes and emotions.

Rich color and complex surfaces are important in these paintings, as is the gesture and the movement of the paint. They all deal with a landscape-like space within a vertical format, emphasizing the up-and-down movement of elements in nature.

These recent abstractions evolved from a prior series of mine, the Wild Biology series, which contained literal representations of nature and combined them with abstract painting.

Wild Biology Paintings are based on the concept that our world, which appears solid, is mostly a void with dispersed specks of matter animated by vibrating energy. In developing a visual equivalent for this fundamental quality of the physical world, I looked for natural phenomena that have an open “architecture” or network quality.  This includes star clusters, aerial views of landforms, erosion patterns, waves in liquid, turbulence, entangled plants, falling autumn leaves, and flocks of perched birds. I also borrowed from a variety of scientific and artistic sources, such as fractal diagrams or line drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.

These works deal with the body under assault, vulnerable, or in a weakened condition.  They stem from my own struggle with cancer several years ago, but I see them as relating to anyone undergoing great change, profound emotions, major transitions or a deep loss.  I see the drawings as being beautiful and the figures represented in a classicizing, idealized manner, despite some imagery of anger or illness.  The body can become more sublime as it is ravaged with age or disease.  On the other hand, the drawings are an attempt to redefine normalcy, saying that this is normal, and then to equate normal with beautiful.

The drawings were executed with conte or charcoal, and were manipulated with water washes or erasers, so that each drawing contains the act of applying and dissolving marks at the same time.  This acts as a metaphor for times of great change.  Many of the drawings were also photographed throughout the process of their being drawn, and those photos were used as the basis for digital video sequences with added sound.

The paintings of figures in water are representational ways to show that some major life changes affect both our physical bodies and our emotional states.  I had read that in the chrysalis stage, the body of the caterpillar liquefies and then reshapes into a butterfly.  That idea of the liquefied body fascinated me.  Our bodies look different, look liquefied, when submerged in water.  The partly-submerged body became a means for me to visually express the changes that occur at birth, puberty, middle age and death.

This is a collection of small series paintings or figurative works.