Watercolor Magic at TAG

Posted on by Diversions LA

Contemporary watercolor art is on full display during the The Shelley Lazarus Award for Excellence in Watercolor Exhibition now at TAG, The Artists Gallery.

Featuring 30 beautifully wrought paintings chosen by jurors Shelley Lazarus and Sally Lamb from more than 160 submissions made by artists throughout the U.S., the works on display are immersively lovely. Each is a unique example of a delicate, rich, and varied classic medium.

From evocative portraiture to impessionistic street scenes…

From realistic cityscape to desert oasis landscape…

…The exhibition exudes the detail and beauty of a medium that dances on the edge of the ethereal.

This 2nd annual juried exhibition honors both the artists exhibited and Shelley Lazarus, a current and Founding Member of TAG since 1993.

Both a watercolor artist and instructor, Shelley Lazarus is based in LA, with her work represented throughout the U.S. and abroad. She herself is a recent first prize winner at the Santa Monica Mountain Celebration, and the Oklahoma National Watercolor Investment Award, and is a member of the Watercolor Honor Society and a signature member of the Oklahoma National Watercolor Society.

Co-juror Sally Lamb is well-known for her celestially radiant depictions of the Southern California landscape. She is one of six founding members of TAG. Santa Monica-based Lamb is the recipient of the Aimee Bourdieu Award for Watercolor from Women’s Painters West, and has work at major museums and galleries throughout Southern California.

TAG itself has reason to celebrate this splendid new exhibition: the gallery is now entering its 31st year as an artist founded and operated non-profit arts cooperative.

Don’t miss the lush variety of work on display in this splendid selection of watercolors running through March 29th. There will be a reception and awards ceremony on Saturday, March 16 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Lazarus will be on hand to present three cash awards and six Awards of Excellence. Light refreshments will be served.

TAG is located at 5458 Wilshire Blvd. in mid-city, just across the street from and east of LACMA.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the exhibition

Aazam Irilian Creates Beautiful Peace

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At the Poway Center for Performing Arts through March 24th, artist Aazam Irilian offers a series of dynamic, vibrant worka that exudes, at the same time, a sense of Zen-like stillness and serenity. Stillness in Chaos features immersive mixed media works that are contemplative in nature and focused on the delicate beauty, precious resilience, and lush colors of the earth. The images offer succor and solace, but also serve as a fierce call to protect our planet.

 

Irilian says her inspiration for the exhibition began during her pandemic lockdown period. “It was during the time that the whole world was in turmoil. In addition to the outside world, my personal life was also changing rapidly.” After 43 years of marriage, Irilian’s husband was diagnosed with dementia which progressed rapidly. “Between the outside world and  what was happening at home, everything seemed to be in chaos anywhere I looked,” she relates.

Calling her painted works here “layered in meaning,” she explains that a rush of thoughts led from one to the next even within the act of creating. “ Each step, action, and stroke would take a different meaning,” she attests.

According to Irilian, in her Indigo Dreaming series, her use of the color blue served as a metaphor for the uniqueness of race, culture, and gender, by introducing only one color additional to blue in each painting. This allowed a fluid and organic flow that moved each into the other, forming new colors. “The message I was communicating was [that] if we allow natural interactions and interconnections to take place, each individual, regardless of race, gender, or culture shines in its own beauty, and we will have a more cohesive human community.”

Along with this sense of purpose and meaning in her palette, Irilian notes that her process would also return a sense of calm, and to memories of her experiences in nature. It was the calm engendered by her process that shaped the exhibition title.

The artist considers her work to be “multi-perspective…meaning that the viewer needs to bring their own experience into each piece and decide what it is they are looking at.” Each work makes a fresh kind of landscape, in which the viewer alone determines what they are seeing and their point of view, including aspects such as whether they are looking into, down, or up at a given landscape.  Viewers are likewise encouraged to determine if a particular image reminds them of a location or experience.

“Take your time,” Irilian says, “really see how a piece makes you feel, what or why you resonate with it—experience being in the moment and letting go of the craziness of your day.”  The richness of Irilian’s palette encourages this type of contemplation. Of it, she says “I believe life is beautiful and filled with joy, regardless all its challenges.”

Combining both original paintings and limited-edition digital assemblages that mirror the artist’s painting style, the exhibition’s open and light-filled space at the Performing Arts Center reflects the show’s creative energy and overall sense of poetry. “Regardless of the medium or the type of art, [my] process is visualizing this energy as waves of light and color, dancing and moving through me, flowing through my hands, and landing onto the canvas or the surface I am working on. I create in a state of mind that I want my viewers to feel when looking at my art.”

While the exhibition blissfully utilizes Irilian’s signature fluid, flowing style, some pieces indicate a transition for the artist in the use of sharper, more angular strokes that fill a full canvas.

Overall, the show is lush in its abundance, as flowing as water or wind; it is lustrous work that shimmers with purpose and passion.

Irilian will be present for a Meet the Artist Event on Saturday, March 23, from 2 – 4 pm.
Poway Center for the Performing arts is located at 15498 Espola Rd, Poway, CA 92064
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Thursday: 10 am to 2 pm, Friday: 1 to 6 pm, Saturday: 1 to 6 pm

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist

 

Hardly a Bit of Blah in “bLAh bLAh bLAh” at Launch Gallery

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Snezana Saraswati Petrovic and Chenhung Chen both weave. They weave artistic magic. They weave respectively using recyclable plastics and recycled metals and wire.

The result is something fascinating and fabulous in their paired solo exhibitions at Launch Gallery in mid-city. From paintings created from silvery staples to mesh wire basket and bell shapes from Chen to 3D-printed plastic corals from Petrovic, this work is lush and lovely, while also speaking to climate change, lost legacies, recyled materials, and reshaped hopes.

What do we envision for ourselves? Can we recreate the world and make it new again? These artists believe the answer is yes. Petrovic gives us dying and healthy corals in a variety of shapes and sizes, AR viewable images of sealife; Chen provides floral and fauna that are as delicate and sweet as any flower, but are shaped from metal and mesh and copper wire.

This immersive exhibition looks at our realities and issues,  crocheting, weaving, binding, shaping, and forming the new from the old; envisioning the interconnectedness of human beings, our planet, and social constructs that divide and unite us, sometimes paradoxically at the same time.

It is gorgeous art; it is also meaningful, looking at both who we are as a species and what we might be, and what our world may become. Can we shape it more gracefully and wonderfully, as these artists have done?

Dream-like and elegant, this is an exhibition that thrills with its creativity and understated beauty. Using unique materials, both artists shape classically brilliant work that resonates visually and emotionally.

Exhibition runs through March 2nd, so be sure to step inside the terrific web of unique sculptural forms these artists wove.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis