Margaret lazzari Moving in Color by Margaret Lazzari

M O V I N G I N C O L O R

MARGARET LAZZARI

MOVING IN COLOR MARGARET LAZZARI

PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS FROM 1988 - 2015

CURATED BY FATEMEH BURNES MT. SAN ANTONIO COLLEGE ART GALLERY Walnut, California September 17 - December 3, 2015 1

Acknowledgments My deepest thanks go to Fatemeh Burnes of the Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery for curating this overview of more than 25 years of my paintings and drawings. The long, intense conversations with Fatemeh in preparation for this show have given me great perspective on my past work and a sense of confidence when moving forward. I am incredibly honored by the essays written by my esteemed colleagues, Betty Ann Brown, Maria Coltharp, Peter Frank, and Amelia Jones. Thank you all for the insights you have given me. My gratitude goes also to Mt. San Antonio College and its Art Gallery, especially Cynthia Orr and David McIntosh, for their support of this wonderful exhibition of my artwork. Thank you to Dr. Bill Scroggins, President of Mt. San Antonio College, to the Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Board of Trustees, to Dr. Irene Malmgren, Vice President of Instruction at Mt. San Antonio College, to the Associated Students, and to Dr. Sue Long, Dean of the Arts Division. And thank you to my husband, Michael Dean, and daughter, Julia Lazzari-Dean, who have constantly supported my work and critiqued dozens of paintings in progress. To my sister, Fran McDaniel, and my brother, Jim Lazzari, thank you for being with me always. And a final thank you to my great extended family and good friends, who will lend a hand whenever I need it.

Contents Interview: Fatemeh Burnes and Margaret Lazzari 5

Necessary Beauty: The Art of Margaret Lazzari by Betty Ann Brown 15

Bodying Forth: Margaret Lazzari's Painted Worlds by Amelia Jones 22

Margaret Lazzari: Between Forces by Peter Frank 26

Margaret Lazzari, Abstractions by Maria Coltharp 32

INTERVIEW FATEMEH BURNES - MARGARET LAZZARI Fatemeh Burnes: In early 2000, while reviewing textbook options for our exhibition design and operation program, I became acquainted with the pedagogical side of Margaret Lazzari. Margaret's mind and approach, especially the way she shares knowledge, inspired me and I was eager to learn more about her. Margaret's dual role as creative artist and as academic is remarkable, as she bridges the two. Being an artist and a professor of art at USC, she emphasizes the relationship of the two practices in a solid and fluid manner and yet she doesn't deviate from her creative process. Her pure and direct sensibility gives texture to her layers of knowledge, enthusiasm, playfulness, commitment and humanity. Margaret's honesty does not rob her work of complexity; rather, her art provokes ambiguity and mystery even in her most direct narratives. It has been a privilege â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an experience of perfect harmony â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to get to know Margaret Lazzari, the visual artist, the author, the educator, the administrator, the public art advocate/artist, and the survivor. And it has been uplifting for both me and the gallery staff to work on Margaret's exhibition. I am eager to share the exhibition and a fabulous exhibition catalog with our campus and community members.

The following is a dialog between Fatemeh Burnes and Margaret Lazzari: FB: What kind of routine or ritual do you follow in the process of creating your work? ML: I try to paint first, and then analyze later. This is not an anti-intellectual stance. I do my best critical thinking when I react to what I have just made, which is now external to me. When it is all in my head, everything is less clear. Are you ever completely satisfied with your work? I can sometimes feel completely satisfied. For example, about once a year, I make a piece that really resonates with me as soon as it's done, and that feeling continues for years after. However, most of my works seem very good and very solid to me, but also seems part of a longterm reaching out to grasp something new that I don't totally understand. So, no, I am not satisfied (in the sense of no more growth) when I am trying to push the boundaries of my work. Opposite: Gold Magenta Orb. Acrylic on Canvas, 2014, 30 x 36 in.

What are your responsibilities to society as an artist? I think as human beings we are responsible to act for the betterment of all people. For some artists, this means making socially active art, but not for me. I try to meet my social responsibilities in other ways. But I also believe that producing art is a real benefit to society. If you are making art, that is a good thing, even if it is only to realize your own vision, or to be present in the moment, or to enjoy the thrill of creation. You are a different, more aware, more connected person after you are immersed in the creative process.

What is your opinion about academia? How advantageous or disadvantageous is the academic world to an artist? Some think academia makes an artist too complacent, stale, or riskadverse. While that could be true, I think that the same thing could happen to an artist who is successful in the art market. My most positive experience being in academia has been the community of creative people who are often a source of new ideas and inspirations. The contact with students has also been great for me, because they are amazing, creative and inquisitive and make me reimagine my own work all the time. I have found that exposure to the classroom and colleagues is always good for me.

Top right: Orbs II, Acrylic on Canvas, 2015, 30 x 40 in. Bottom right: Orbs III, Acrylic on Canvas, 2015, 30 x 40 in. Opposite: Detail of Orbs II.

Given the challenge of the art market, how satisfied would you be with giving up the free enterprise of your artwork in exchange for making art provided with a public budget, as with the Works Project Administration in the late 1930â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s? I love doing public art and I am part of an artist team with Lauren Evans, a sculptor. In this collaboration, we each brings our own skill sets to the problem and creates work that is a wonderful fusion of our individual contributions. I also like engaging with the public as we develop a piece. When finished, the work lives in the public, available in the everyday lives of people, some of whom may not have access to other art. That is amazing. I get a real kick realizing that my Metro piece is seen by 20,000 people a week. Would I give up my studio practice for that? Well, I wouldn't want to. The studio work is a special personal pursuit. While the work may eventually be sold to an individual, and not seen by the public, it is nevertheless exceptional when someone loves your work enough to want to live with it in their home every day. There is also a model in some countries where artists of a certain stature are guaranteed funding, which makes it unnecessary for them to be part of the art market at all. Marketing my art takes time, and I wouldn't mind giving that up and trying another system for a couple years! It might be fun, especially if I still had people around me to keep me honest, and a way to meet new people who are genuinely inquisitive about my work and want to discuss ideas.

Above: Planting a Garden, Lazzari and Evans Public Art Team, City of Pasadena Temporary Public Art Project, 2011-2013. Five panels of painted wood and etched Plexiglas, steel frames with embedded LEDs; panels range from 10 feet to 4 feet tall. Opposite: Owensmouth/Canoga Park. Margaret Lazzari, designer. Los Angeles METRO, Sherman Way Station, Orange Line Extension, Mosaic floor and porcelain enamel steel panel. 2011. 8

Circle in square, #2 (Hummingbirds). Acrylic on Canvas, 2012, 40 x 40 in.

How did your parents influence your career as an artist? My parents were always more comfortable with my being identified as a teacher than as an artist, even though they themselves were attracted to making things, whether in carpentry or tailoring. The idea of being an artist did not make sense given their Depression-era upbringing. I have been told that my paternal grandfather was an amazing craftsman who fashioned his own tools, loved music, and built houses, churches, and altars for his community. I heard that he took great joy in life.

Front and Back, Post-Surgery. Conte on paper, 2004, 30 x 40 in.

Do you have any words of guidance for the next generation of artists? Don't pay too much attention to those who would tell you that you have to do this or that to be an artist. Figure out your ideas. (This takes time!) Figure out your audiences. Then figure out what means you will use, and how you have to structure your life, to bring these two together. I have seen many artists with day jobs outside of art doing very strong and important work. So I don't think it is necessary to be a full-time artist to still be active and productive. Protecting your studio time and working regularly are essential, however. It's almost like exercising every day. What are your most memorable and meaningful projects? Are they also your most successful and/or popular ones? Probably the Cancer series is most meaningful to me. This is the group of drawings and paintings I create while I was recovering from breast cancer, like Front and Back Post-Surgery. It is certainly not the most popular one in terms of sales, but the work does move people who see it. The Floating series still grabs me, because it is about change in our bodies from birth, through adolescence, and then aging. Also I love the space and color in my recent abstractions! 11

How do you perceive the value of old traditions in visual art? History, techniques, and work from the past are so important to any work today. It is certainly true for me. Drawing is the basis of observation, thinking, and planning. My own work has been inspired by the paintings across many cultures and from almost every period since the 1400s. You can really see this in the Floating Series (pages 13, 17, 23, 25, and 36) and Cancer series (pages, 11, 12, 18, and 27). The desire to pass on these traditions motivated me to co-author two textbooks, Exploring Art: A Global, Thematic Approach, and Drawing: A Sketch and Textbook. Of course, what is important about the past is not memorizing a lot of facts. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that it presents you with an array of models, alternative ideas, different cultures, different time periods, and different ways of doing things. Great fodder!

Above: In Deep Water, Watercolor on paper, 1998, 22 x 30 in. Opposite: Floating Figures No. 1 - 3, Conte on paper, 2004, each 30 x 22 in. 13

Necessary Beauty: The Art of Margaret Lazzari

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul. ~Vassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910

Margaret Lazzari's paintings are beautiful. A hundred and fifty years ago, this would have been high praise indeed--and it is intended that way here--but art and beauty have gone separate ways in the modern era and the issue of beauty is complicated today. As it happens, Lazzari's remarkable oeuvre moves from painterly figuration to expressive abstraction. In doing so, it rehearses the history of avant-garde modernism that severed beauty from the definition and reception of art. The first painter to sustain an avant-garde practice was French Realist Edouard Manet (1832-1883). By the mid-1860s, Manet had abandoned the smooth, finely detailed, almost photographic compositions favored by the French Royal Academy of Fine Arts as well as the general public. Instead of thinking of paintings as windows into ideal, three-dimensional worlds, Manet depicted common people in works that were adamantly flat, works that announced their paintedness through the use of loosely applied, sometimes thickly impastoed color. Paintings like Manet's Olympia (1863) were criticized not only because of their content (Olympia portrayed a reclining female nude in what was recognizable to nineteenth century Parisians as a whore house), but even more importantly because of the style the artist used. The press referred to Olympia as comic, obscene, and "incompletely painted."[1] Manet's painting was so offensive, reported one of the artist's friends, that officials had to take special precautions to prevent outraged viewers from puncturing or tearing the canvas.[2] In short, most of Manet's contemporaries failed to see the painting as beautiful, or valuable in any way. Almost 100 years later, American critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was to assert that "all profoundly original art looks ugly at first."[3] Manet's uniquely original and once maligned work is revered today. His "unfinished" style--precisely that which upset his contemporaries most--is now judged beautiful. As Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry (1866-1834) observed, "We usually apply the word beautiful to those works of art in which familiarity [emphasis mine] has enabled us to grasp the unity easily."[4]

[1] T.J. Clark's "Olympia's Choice," The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1999. p. 131. [2] Gilles Neret. Manet. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2003. p. 22. The friend who reported this was Antonin Proust. [3] Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, Ugliness, The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory. London: Tauris, 2014, p. 4. [4] Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Petersborough, NH: Open Court, 2003, p. 41.

Opposite: Cliffs, Acrylic on Canvas, 2012, 48 x 40 in.

Margaret Lazzari's figurative work from the 1980s and 1990s similarly employs loosely applied, sometimes thickly impastoed paint. Pursuit is a diptych from 1996 that portrays a swimming figure haloed by rings of white light. To the right, a second figure moves towards the first. Submerged in water and obscured by a dark shadow, the second swimmer is an ominous yet anonymous threat. The painting reads as a metaphor for the unknown dangers--from human to biological to environmental--that pursue each of us. Beyond its possible meaning[s], the painting is a lush assertion of the sensual beauty of pigment suspended in oil and laid across a fabric [canvas] structure. In his 2009 volume The Alchemy of Paint, art historian Spike Bucklow points out that the pigments historically used to manufacture paint were valued for more than their color.[5] Indeed, they added sophisticated layers of meaning to the painting. For example, the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli, whether used directly or converted into the brilliant blue paint known as ultramarine, was believed to lend an aura of power and divine presence to any artwork that employed it. (Lapis lazuli is the blue stone seen in the funerary mask of King Tutankhamun. Ultramarine paint was used in many Renaissance paintings of the Virgin's robe. It also appears in the headpiece of Jan Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring from 1665.) Bucklow reminds us that the experience of color was and is a physical sensation that can verge on the sacred. The blue in Lazzari's Pursuit glows like lapis lazuli, giving the water an insistent radiance. It reminds viewers of the alchemical potential of paint, of the way that otherwise inert, neutral substances are transformed, by the skilled hand of the artist, into images that appear to have lives of their own. The water--in actuality a variegated mixture of blue and white pigment suspended in (now dried) oil--appears fluid, rippled, cool, and deep. But rather than seeing the constituent elements, viewers are imaginatively engaged and find themselves submerged in a dynamic aqueous world. The mimetic magic of art invites us to experience not the chemical substances but what they re-present. [5] Spike Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint, Art, Science and Secrets form the Middle Ages. London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 2009.

Opposite and Above. Pursuit. Oil on Canvas, 1997, Diptych, total size 30 x 72 in.

The power of artistic transformation is also seen in Lazzari's conte crayon drawings from her Cancer Series. Conte crayons are made from natural pigments (brown clay, black charcoal, etc.) mixed with a wax-like binder. The avant-garde French artist Georges Seurat (1859-1891) used conte crayons to create many of the studies he created in preparation for his Pointillist paintings. Lazzari, on the other hand, uses the medium for final works, such as Scream from 2004. The large three-part drawing of a bald woman whose face is distorted by anger (or fear?) conveys the anguish of cancer. She screams, then collapses forward, crippled by the betrayal of her body. The powerful rendering is, in many respects, a self-portrait, a visual projection of the artist's feelings as she traversed the cancer experience herself. The image is poignant, perhaps frightening, and it, too, insists on the magic of artistic re-presentation. The images created by reddish brown clay, wax, and paper backing function as objective correlatives of the depths of human suffering. Nineteenth century avant-garde artists like Manet and Seurat set the stage for the early twentieth century move to abstract art. Russian-born painter Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) had a powerful reaction to a painting of haystacks created by Manet's friend and colleague, Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926). He later wrote, "I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour."[6] [6] Lindsay, Kenneth C. (1982). Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co. p. 363.

Opposite and Above: Scream, Conte on paper, 2004, 30 x 44 in. 19

From that point forward, Kandinsky began to eliminate recognizable subject matter in favor of painterly abstraction. In 1911, he penned a manifesto of abstraction titled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, linking abstract art with both the quest for the spiritual and our need for beauty.[7] One of Kandinsky's paintings from that period is Improvisation 28 (second version). Loose geometric forms swirl and writhe in abandon over a color-saturated field. Although the image is loosely based on a landscape, it is much more about the artist's "own inner world" than the natural world outside him.[8] Over the last decade, Margaret Lazzari has moved from representation to abstraction. Like Kandinsky, she has been inspired by the natural landscape to create painterly equivalents of her "own inner world." Especially while driving to and from her daughter's university residence, Lazzari has traversed the fertile Central Valley of California. The broad expanses, suspended between mountain and sea, have inspired compositions like Gray Brown Dust Devil from 2014. A diagonal spiral of dark color spins across a pale ground, pulling smaller shapes into its consuming center. The sharp contrast of shadowed movement across relative calm can be read as both meteorological explosion and emotional crisis. And it is beautiful, a compelling visual metaphor for the disruptions that punctuate our existence. American art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013) made an important distinction between the beauty of nature (such as the beauty of California's Central Valley) and the beauty of art (such as Lazzari's paintings inspired by the valley.) According to Danto, "In natural beauty, the beauty is external to the thought; in art the beauty is internal to the work."[9] In other words, Margaret Lazzari incorporates the beauty into her painting as she creates it. The beauty dwells in the very body, the corpus, of the work. Danto went on to say, "Beauty is one mode among many through which thoughts are presented in art to human sensibility--disgust, horror, sublimity, and sexuality are still others. These modes explain the relevance of art to human existence, and room for them all must be found in an adequate definition of art."[10] Art like Margaret Lazzari's--and the beauty it embodies--is supremely relevant to human existence. Springing from the "inner need" of what Kandinsky calls "the soul," the beauty of Lazzari's art is indeed necessary. Betty Ann Brown March 2015 [Betty Ann Brown is an art historian, critic, and curator, and Professor of Art History at California State University, Northridge.} [7] Kandinsky, Wassily (1911). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. translated by Michael T. H. Sadler (2004). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. [8] http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/past/exhibit/4671 [9] Danto, p. 55 [10] Danto, p. 56

Gray Brown Dust Devil. Acrylic on canvas, 2014, 30"x 40 in. A detail of this painting appears on the catalog cover.

Bodying Forth: Margaret Lazzari’s Painted Worlds

At its most evocative, painting bodies forth. It renders marks of the body’s efforts, signaling a past act of making that touches us here today as we engage with the work. Margaret Lazzari’s paintings body forth in just this way—presenting themselves as bodies (fleshy objects) and as expressions of a making body. They elaborate worlds—dense thickets and forests and oceans (via carefully orchestrated abstracted strips, patches, splashes, and swirls of paint), or bodies that crouch, balance, twist, float, or otherwise announce themselves to us as depictions of fellow humans, fully fleshed and heavy with care or light with life and action. In two early groups of works, the “Body Paintings” and “Floating Series,” Lazzari evokes the density of other bodies through muscular swathes of paint that, in turn, remind us of the lived power and thrust of her gestural movements in making them. In this way our bodies become attached to or repelled by the paintings, moved or repulsed or seduced by their merging of corporeal representation with corporeal indexicality (the marks of their having been made at a previous point in time via Lazzari’s own thinking, moving body). In the darkly rendered 1988 large-scale oil on panel, Dread, for example, from “Body Paintings,” we see the top half of a man hovering at the bottom of the picture plane, his darkened body and face (seemingly clutched in fear) submerged in wreathes of blue paint, a light fixture hovering menacingly above. Recalling Van Gogh’s psychotic painting of the “night café” he visited in Southern France in the 1880s (where whorls of thick paint in garish colors scream out the artist’s presumptive emotional agony), Lazzari enlists simple domestic spaces, bodies, and objects towards emotional ends. Dread, dense with paint as with emotional impact, is beautiful but menacing. 22

Paintings in the “Floating” series suspend bodies in thick skeins of paint: Pursuit (1996) shows a body as a black silhouette, head emerging from the water of a swimming pool; the form of the body is carved out of the whirling eddies of water, washes of white and blue and green and grey oil paint. Holding On (1999), is equally vertiginous in its radical use of space and evocation of the energy of lived embodiment: perspectivally “we”—in place of the painter—seem to be positioned above a pool looking over a girl or young woman about to plunge into its blue depths. The energy is expressed as that of the painter (slashing and stroking patches of paint testify to her virtuosity) but also as potential in the coiled figure ready to jump. We feel the energy; it bodies forth through both the indexical signs of painting and the depicted figure, the content of the work.

Opposite: Dread. Oil on Panel, 1989, 80 x 72 in. Right: Holding On. Oil on Canvas, 1999, 48 x 36 in.

Such virtuosity often comes at a price; psychological intensity is sacrificed in the service of preciousness, prettiness, sentimentality. But with Lazzari’s accomplished paintings the virtuosity carries serious emotional weight. Her skill serves not to sentimentalize but, rather, to foreground not fully explicit themes and signs of human striving, wanting, yearning, leaping—and even more basically of doing and feeling and seeing. The paintings body forth. And it is up to us to catch them here and now as we “meet” them in the present. Amelia Jones May 18, 2015 [Amelia Jones is an art Historian, art critic, curator, and Professor at the University of Southern California.]

Crouching Figure. Acrylic, conte and charcoal on paper, 1989, 44 x 30 in. 24

Above and Below. Oil on Canvas, 1998, Diptych, total size 48 x 72 in.

Margaret Lazzari: Between Forces The dichotomy between representational and abstract art has all but vanished. While completely non-objective artwork continues to eschew depictive reference, and completely pictorial artwork continues to annotate the seen world, the frontier between the tendencies, once a site of gross misunderstandings and pitched battles, is now fertile ground for hybridization and, indeed, experiment. Over the last decade Margaret Lazzari has wandered, sometimes gingerly, sometimes giddily, through this rich borderland. Where once her paintings riveted our eyes on their human presences, now they lure us with the very absence of such subjects, offering instead the vibratory brushstrokes and nuanced colors that once described the very beings they now replace in these canvases. Lazzari’s evolution away from figuration is just that, an evolution. It is motivated not by any ideology or radical change of mind, only by personal experience and curiosity. What happens, Lazzari wonders, when palette and brush are put to tasks less specific, more nebulous, than heretofore? Do they become liberated? What kind of rigor do they still require? Does the disappearance of the figure mean absence of reference? Lazzari was long known for an especially intense approach to figural imagery, one that very consciously reawakened the protoexpressionist passion of the Venetian and Spanish Renaissance and the northern Baroque. Whether her subjects were gentle or ominous, in agony or in ecstasy, she drove home their humanity without relying on narrative context. Lazzari found her people in moments and in eternity, either divorced from the quotidian or blissfully engulfed in it. This exploration – celebration, evisceration, transmutation – of the figure peaked with her penetrating series, mostly drawings, of figures in stress and pain, but manifesting durability and resistance in the face of lifechanging, not to mention life-threatening, conditions (conditions implied by the bodies themselves). The series resulted from Lazzari’s own experience with cancer.

Opposite page, left: Prism Landscape, Acrylic on Canvas, 2014, 30 x 36 in. Opposite page, center: Bent, Oil on Canvas, 1989, 60 x 44 in. Opposite page, right: Spread, Oil on Canvas, 1989, 60 x 44 in. Above: Coming Through. Charcoal on paper, 2004, 45 x 60 in.

While it – the experience and the artwork that resulted – further focused Lazzari’s already intense concentration on the humanness of humans, it also seemed to exhaust that concentration. Her next paintings took their cues from botanical subjects, and in these Lazzari allowed herself to become increasingly fanciful. She combined passages of exacting naturalism, applied to the description of fruits and flowers, with equally stunning passages of coloristic improvisation, painterly as ever but now blurring the distinction between flower and pod, object and landscape, figure and ground. Luminous and elaborate, these “wild biology paintings” – “wild” defining both “biology” and “painting” – brought the visceral, and sexual, nature of flora to the forefront, much as Georgia O’Keeffe had but in a less schematic way. Indeed, these – and the more nearly non-objective paintings that have succeeded them – are not modernist abstractions, they are post- or even neo-modernist abstractions. They search for metaphor and essence while relying on the highly refined techniques of Western art history, techniques once applied to the descriptions of deities and their human counterparts. These are counterparts as well, as it happens, vivid manifestations, part plant and part galaxy, of the energy that has animated art and life since one begat the other. By wandering the nearly-invisible edge between representational and abstract artistic practice, Margaret Lazzari has uncovered the nearlyinvisible force that binds us together and makes us alive. Everything is in the picture. Peter Frank Los Angeles April 2015 [Peter Frank is an art critic, curator, and poet who lives and works in Los Angeles.]

Opposite: Large Yellow Tulip, Acrylic on Canvas, 2010, 58 x 52 in.R ight: Circle in Square #1 (Jupiter), Acrylic on Canvas, 2012, 40 x 40 in.

Turbulence, Acrylic on Canvas, 2007, 70 x 54 in.

Tendrils, Acrylic on Canvas, 2005 70 x 50 in.

Margaret Lazzari, Abstractions

Margaret Lazzari’s abstractions made up of bold colors, broad strokes, and delicate lines are a new world for the artist, one of inclusivity. She is painting matter and energy, painting the very essence of life and the world. So she is painting us, and not us, and what’s in between as well: the infinitesimal reflected in bodies of water and light. If you are at all familiar with Lazzari’s work, you can see that her abstractions are a letting go, a release of hard and translatable images in favor of whispers and shades that amount to an embodiment of light and energy. As a viewer I could feel my own energy on the canvases too, mingling with the other bits of matter and color that make up her universe. Somehow she manages to make this vast inclusion seem very personal, a masterful contradiction and beautiful to behold. This focus on energy, matter, and light links us as living beings with the larger space around us. So even though the paintings are firmly abstractions, they are at the same time reminiscent lush landscapes, complete with the occasional horizon line. Lazzari lived in Ocean Park, as well as Mar Vista and Manhattan Beach. The diffused light and watery blues of Southern California beach cities definitely play into her work. Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series comes to mind, the way he famously riffed on his view of the Santa Monica neighborhood in his rectilinear abstractions, though Lazzari’s abstractions seem more spiritual. Before California, she lived in Texas and Iowa, where the vast arching sky captivated the artist. In A Wash, 2014, all of these elements seem to come together in a perfect metaphor for life – a timeline, a gathering of spaces, the elements. It gets beyond language to give shape to the things one already knows. Maria Coltharp April, 2015 [Maria Coltharp is the Curator of the Permanent Collection at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach.] A Wash, Acrylic on Canvas, 2014, 40 x 72 in. 32

Yellow Charcoal. Acrylic and charcoal pigment on canvas, 2014. 40 x 70 in. Detail below.

Left. The Plunge, Watercolor on paper, 1997, 42 x 30 in. Right. Cosmic Aquatic Landscape. Acrylic on canvas, 2014, 30 x 40 in.

States of Matter: Grace. Oil on panel, 1997. Triptych, total size 60 x 120 in. Collection of Mark and Terri Aimerito.

Biography Margaret Lazzari is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, California, and Professor of Painting/Drawing at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. Her paintings for the past decade are abstractions based on landscapelike spaces and biological imagery. Before 2003 her work was figurative. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Her paintings are in The Angell Foundation Collection, Los Angeles; the Huntsville Art Museum, Huntsville, Alabama; Adam’s Mark Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia; Arthur M. Anderson, Inc., Saint Paul, Minnesota; Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Collection, Los Angeles; Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City, New Jersey; as well as other corporate and college collections. Lazzari also has completed a number of public art commissions. Her solo commission for Los Angeles Metro is installed in the Sherman Way Station of the Orange Line Extension. She also has collaborated with Lauren Evans on several commissions, including permanent installations for the City of Santa Monica and Tripointe Homes in Huntington Beach, as well as temporary pieces for the City of Pasadena and the City of Manhattan Beach. Lazzari is the co-author of Exploring Art: A Global, Thematic Approach, an award-winning art appreciation text published by Cengage. She is one of three authors on Drawing: A Text and Sketchbook, published by Oxford University Press. Her single author text is The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist.

Peonies. Acrylic on Canvas, 2008, 60 x 60 in.

Margaret Lazzari was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and received her MFA degree from Washington University in St. Louis. www. margaret lazzari.com

Catalog copyright Margaret Lazzari Necessary Beauty: The Art of Margaret Lazzari copyright Betty Ann Brown Bodying Forth: Margaret Lazzari’s Painted Worlds copyright Amelia Jones Margaret Lazzari: Between Forces copyright Peter Frank Margaret Lazzari, Abstractions copyright Maria Coltharp

A Wash. Acrylic on Canvas, 2014, 44 x 70 in.