Margaret Lazzari Essay
#2 Lisa Adams (The Visiting Painting)
#3 Margaret Lazzari (Response Painting)
The painting that preceded mine contains an obvious duality. The blue bars seem rigid, forceful, flat, straight, linear, surface-bound, oppressive, and permanent. The underlying image is soft, diffused, ephemeral, circular, organic, and spacious.
Yet each suggests a kind of structure. I thought the bars represented the rational mind, our social structures, or even the geometry and rigid patterns we use to organize the cities and highways we build. The background suggested to me the microscopic world and the cosmic world, both of which contain empty spaces with small specks of matter animated by energy. The circles and spirals were the orbits of heavenly bodies, the orbits of electrons, or the meanderings of our unconscious minds.
Blue predominated, which made me think of winter-cold if the background was filled with snowflakes, or machine-cold if those shapes were gears. I also tried to imagine the background shapes to be flowers, but never succeeded. Perhaps the blue was meant to bridge the duality, to unite the bars and the snowflakes. However, when I stared fixedly at the painting, pink afterimages appeared like dancing lines jumping around the blue bars, or pink clouds floating among the blue amorphous shapes. Rigidity, clarity, and definition dissolved, reappeared, and dissolved again.
When I started my painting, I totally covered the canvas with a pink wash that matched that afterimage. The pink morphed into brown, tan, and yellow. Stripes appeared almost immediately, and later I reintroduced blue again as well. The cat’s head emerges from and disintegrates into those colors. Nothing is really solid in this world, regardless of how we perceive it. Nothing is really solid in my
painting, either. The world contains not only matter, energy and structure, but also the consciousness of billions of sentient beings. I perceive the world with my own senses and my own limitations. I am surrounded by living things that experienced life in their own way, in their individual dimensions.