In Sickness and in Health
Margaret Lazzari. Photo
Margaret Lazzari doesn’t simply paint isolated subjects, but over several years will delve into different themes, the result being that her oeuvre consists of numerous significant portfolios. There’s the Re-Inventions of Beauty series, the Floating series, the Cancer series, and the Wild Biology series. Each one seems to have accompanied or been precipitated by a life-changing moment in which the artist, now 56, found herself.
“My work is about big things,” she acknowledges. “A lot of artwork today is purposely kind of distant, ironic comments on our world situation, but I think I’m different from that. I think that the work’s not ironic, it’s not distant; it’s very personal.
“I never saw it in the past as being essentially about me, but I guess it’s been the record of what’s consumed me at major points of my life. On some level the personal is not very sharable, it doesn’t really reach out, but on a deep level of birth and sickness and growth and season and cycles and big meanings, the deeply personal is of course the same for every single one of us.”
“Julia Dreaming the Universe,” by Margaret Lazzari
Beauty is as beauty does
Margaret Lazzari, who has been a professor of art at USC for 24 years and resides in Manhattan Beach, met Peggy Zask last year at one of Angela Silverman’s Friends of Local Artists events, held at the Manhattan Beach Country Club. Zask, who teaches at Mira Costa High School and also runs PS Zask Gallery in Rancho Palos Verdes, invited Lazzari to participate in her forthcoming exhibition, “Being: The Fundamental Figure,” which opens with a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. this Saturday. The show also highlights Bronwyn Towle, Julien Nguyen, Gabe Kreiswirth, Regine Hawkins, Susan Elizalde-Holler, Amber Dixon, Patrick Crabb, and Jonathan Bray.
“Peggy was interested in works that I had done that were strongly figurative,” Lazzari says, “which is most of my work from 1986 to about 2003. I had a couple of different series from that period…”
And here she mentions the Re-Inventions of Beauty series. As Lazzari noted last year in the brochure that accompanied a display of her works at the Creative Arts Center in Manhattan Beach, “This was my first series that explored issues that were of concern personally to me – beauty, aging and the power of women. In these works I redefine beauty as vitality and strength, rather than conformity to certain cultural ideals.”
This series, which confronts accepted notions of idealized or mythologized beauty, substituted less conventionally attractive figures for the various gods and goddesses and pinup models normally touted as icons of beauty. In particular, whether employing her as a Venus or as a personification of Dawn or Dusk, was Lazzari’s full-bodied and middle-aged friend, Bobi Jackson, an African-American with cropped hair who did not exactly resemble Botticelli’s young maiden on the half-shell.
Her role model, so to speak? Michelangelo.
“When I was doing the Beauty series I borrowed from him a lot,” Lazzari says, “because his notion of beauty was much more of a kind of bulky, heroic type. His was very muscle-bound. The model for that series was a large woman with a large bulk and a lot of presence. I like the idea that Michelangelo’s beauty was not simpering, but was really robust.”
“Holding On,” by Margaret Lazzari
Unmoored, and drifting
“There was another series after that,” Lazzari continues, “which I started in the mid-‘90s called the Floating series, and that was a lot of figures in water. The early ‘90s was a difficult time for my immediate family: I lost two brothers and my father in about a five-year span, and a couple of close uncles and an aunt as well. It was a really hard time, and I was looking for some kind of visual metaphor to express my feelings about this.”
This is an arresting, enigmatic set of pictures, enhanced and made more intriguing by the uncertain light, which at times has an eerie glow. The figures may be in a swimming pool, but they could also be in a lake or in the middle of a vast, calm sea.
“When we look at bodies in water they’re completely morphed, completely visually dissolving. They look present, but they don’t look the same. I had some pictures of people in the pool at night, and that kind of strange illumination seemed really perfect for it. One of them, ‘Letting Go’ (illustrated here), was from an image when I photographed figures underwater at night, and of course the lighting’s not accurate. There were a lot of color shifts; this was the old days with film. When I sent them to be processed they came back with stickers on them saying something’s wrong with your camera; these are out of focus and the color’s wrong.
“I looked at them and I thought, Ahhh, I love these; this is what I’m looking for.”
Lazzari soon realized that this body of work wasn’t simply about expressing ideas of death, but also of transformation. Perhaps her discovery was aided by watching the growth of her daughter, Julia, who was born in the early 1990s.
“They make these toys called Transformers where things change from jeeps into big men. I was thinking, that’s no more amazing than the transformations that my daughter went through from age 10 to 14. It was such a body-changing moment, completely.”
(Snake) In the garden
Peggy Zask was also interested in a work from a subsequent series called Wild Biology. Lazzari had started it in 2003, and it was also the result, she says, of another major body-changing event: her bout with breast cancer.
When Lazzari and her husband, Michael, purchased their Manhattan Beach home, the backyard was bare. During those first few years, while Michael planted trees and vines and turned that wasteland into a garden of paradise, Julia grew from age four to age 10 and Lazzari began her Wild Biology paintings. But then her cancer was detected.
“The whole yard and the growth there was really taking off,” she says, “and that seemed like such a wonderful thing. At the same time, I had this growth inside me that was growing and taking off – and that seemed to be a bad thing.”
Subsequently, the medical imagery she was bombarded with “was beautiful and at the same time it was kind of bizarre and foreign,” especially in that it reminded her of water patterns, with their ripples or waves of energy. “I spent seven years doing Wild Biology,” Lazzari notes, “seven years doing a lot of imagery that deals with the natural world, layers and layers of growth, and then the way we make models and diagrams of it. And layering that, and trying to find thing with an open architecture so that you would see things through other layers to get that kind of richness and complexity.
“I’ve always been influenced by Leonardo da Vinci because I think that with his great, wide range of interests I feel a real affinity with him, and I like using his drawings in my paintings as much as possible. If I can, I’ll put a sketch of his in there. I’ve done it a lot with Wild Biology.”
We can see this for ourselves in the recent acrylic, “Julia Dreaming the Universe.”
The painting, Lazzari says, which Zask responded to and chose for the show, “has the face of my daughter in it, but it’s only partly realized; it’s also partly not there.” She continues:
“I’m interested in the religious traditions of Christianity and all other major world religions. And of course there’s Vishnu who, when he falls asleep, dreams the universe, and when he wakes up the universe ends.
“I was watching Julia, and I was thinking of her at this moment when she was about to leave my house and go into the world, and her plans are like dreaming the universe. So I wanted to do this painting of her at this moment when everything that’s in her brain is like the same as everything outside, her ability to dream it, realize it, and then the realization comes back and becomes a part of her dreams. All of that stuff seemed very good to me, and it seemed to be appropriate for the way Wild Biology imagery works.”
“Letting Go,” by Margaret Lazzari
Then and now, and later
As an undergraduate, Margaret Lazzari attended a Jesuit university and majored in studio art, although she studied quite a bit of art history as well – which is clearly evident in Exploring Art: A Global Thematic Approach, the generously illustrated textbook that she co-authored with Dona Schlesier. Lazzari then went on to get a MFA, also in studio art, from Washington University in St. Louis. She had fulltime jobs teaching in Iowa and Texas before being hired by USC: “I’m a professor there at the Roski School of Fine Arts, and I’ve also been the chair there. They’ve been very supportive of me. It’s been good employment for an artist.”
Lazzari’s influences in art are as varied as one might expect, ranging from the northern and southern Renaissance period, through the Baroque, and right up to the present day: “I’m always looking at the newest stuff because that’s what my students are interested in. It’s heartening to see some really interesting painting going on right now.
“I liked all of the Baroque painters with their rich sense of color. I always liked Degas’s pastels because the surface had a huge color intensity; the pastels, especially the way he used them, never exactly pinned things down to a concrete specificity. They were crumbly, and the color saturation was always a little bit growing and out here, when it was supposed to be describing real concrete form. It never quite did. And I liked the way that happened; I think I’m always looking for the moments where specificity is giving way and crumbling into some other kind of thing. Those moments of growth or decay or change. The moments when we’re about to dissolve and you begin to see another picture emerge behind the top picture.”
However, what makes Lazzari’s work even more compelling is how she enhances and deepens her representational work.
“Going back to religious traditions, I’m very interested in how basic and geometric symbols are used by religions and science, and flowchart mappers, and mappers of all sorts to give meaning to things. I like to incorporate circles, because in the Hindu tradition and also Islamic tradition, that’s everything, that’s all-potential in Hindu, that’s god in Islam. And then the square, which is this specific moment, this now, where we’re at. So I like to embed those shapes in there, to embed diagrams in the work, to layer things. I like to deal with specific imagery but especially where it can reference larger themes.
“Pattern is also a really interesting thing for me,” Lazzari adds, “because pattern is associated with decoration and beauty. Almost every knowledge system that we have is based on pattern – letter forms and how you diagram things… Patterns are really strong in Islamic and Hindu paintings, even Aboriginal paintings, and so I like looking at those things. I don’t think they’ve appeared concretely in my work, but I think they will.”
When that begins to happen, Margaret Lazzari may find herself at the beginning of a new series. If it’s anything like her previous bodies of work then we have something special to look forward to.
Being: The Fundamental Figure opens Saturday with a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. at PS Zask Gallery, 31252 Palos Verdes Drive West, Rancho Palos Verdes. The group show is up through July 31. Call (310) 429-0973 or go to pszaskgallery.com. ER