Featured Articles:
Artists Nurtured by Nature, by Brian Slattery for the New Haven Independent on the exhibition at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art of selected artists of the New Haven Paint and clay Club:
“Downstairs, in one of the first floor galleries, Nancy Lasar’s paintings share a certain affinity with Brown’s in the use of light colors and dynamic composition. Lasar’s methods evolved over a period of years, as she switched from drawing on paper to drawing on canvas. But what drew her to her airy aesthetic?
“I’ve always been intrigued as to whether it’s a solid or a particle,” Lasar said, referring to, well, any object — appearing solid in our lived experience but in fact composed of atoms that are mostly empty space. It’s the stuff that can give a nervous chemistry student in high school nightmares, the idea that the only thing preventing him from melding with the chair he’s sitting in is the repulsion of electrons. For Lasar, however, the dichotomy is more a source of fascination. “Matter is not what you think,” she said. “We’re solid, but we’re interacting all the time.” Hence the shapes in her paintings that appear a little unstable, as if they could move and morph into one another.
With that attention to instability and motion, she doesn’t necessarily consider any of the paintings to be truly done? “It is possible that I could decide, ‘I should add to that.’” Quoting artist Paul Klee, she said, “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”
In drawing inspiration from how we perceive reality, Lasar finds herself musing on the ways in which science inquiry and spirituality sometimes seem to connect. “Aren’t we in the age when science are spirituality are confirming each other — at the same time that we’re on the verge of extinction? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” She said it with a wry smile.
Singular and Serial, by Catherine Kernan: “I am pleased to be included in this beautiful new hard cover publication from Schiffer Publications with prints from more than 70 top artists demonstrating what monotypes and monoprints offer. This book is available through Amazon.” (ISBN: 978-0-7643-5727-5)
Republican American, Review by Tracey O’Shaughnessy, Still Life is Never Still:
“Lastly, Nancy Lasar’s free-flowing pastel canvases might be poorly identified as still life, but it really doesn’t matter. Lasar continues to explore relationships between line and space, gymnastic glyphs and severe geometries, with economy and ingenuity, her swirling graphite dances with her graceful pastel colors to create compositionally enchanting canvases.
Lasar has always been judicious in her placement of firm objects- mugs, pitchers, vases- with more organic forms – insects, flowers, plants – but she’s grown even more economical in her paintings, letting the canvas make a statement of its own. Her large “Strings and Things,” an image of coiling, serpentine flowers lunging out of their vessels toward a free- spirited, delicately charged atmosphere, is a restrained statement on the pleasures of abandonment within the confines of rootedness. Still life? No, Lasar seems to answer. Life is never still.” January 30, 2018
Artscope Magazine, Stunning & Complex: Still Life at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, November/December 2017. Work featured on cover and inside article.
Current Exhibitions:
Valley Gallery, Valley Spirit Cooperative, Washington Depot, CT. In conjunction with her current exhibition, Nancy will be giving a short talk and demonstration about her prints and process. This exhibition runs through June 2019, with an opening on First Friday June 7th from 5-7. The talk will be at 6 pm.
The Gallery at Still River Editions, Current Exhibition: Flux and Flow: Unique Techniques and Collaborations: “Over her long career, Washington, Connecticut artist Nancy Lasar has explored multiple kinds of media often combining and re-combining to create hybrid effects and crosspollinations of form.
Paint and print could overlay an original digital composition and monotype grounds, when dried on mylar, could act as negatives for black and white photographs in the darkroom.
In 2009 collaborations with her artist/filmmaker brother, John Davis, in unique abstract photography, prompted them to seek the expert services of Connecticut Photographics and Still River Editions. Thus further collaborations and refinements of their work ensued. The resulting art works are featured in this exhibition opening on Saturday, June 9th to coincide with the State of Connecticut’s Open House Day and runs through September 28.”
Previous Exhibitions:
2018
The Art of Print and Works on Paper, The White Gallery, Lakeville, CT, July 21- September 9, 2018. “The White Gallery, 342 Main Street, Lakeville, presents noted and talented tri-state artists working in prints and works on paper; Allen Blagden, Nathalie Chabrier, Ann Chernow, Naomi Grossman, Joan Jardine, Natasha Karpinskaia, Nancy Lasar, Alan McCord, Terri Moore, Constance Old, Randy Orzano, and Nancy McTeague-Stock. Whether etchings, pictures, or mixed media, it is all finished on paper.”
-The Litchfield County Times
Still Life Untethered, Five Points Gallery, Torrington, CT, January 18- February 24: Group exhibition dealing with multiple approaches to still life, opening reception Friday, January 19 at 6 pm, and artist talk Friday, February 9 at 6 pm
2017
3rd Annual Hand Pulled Prints: The Current Practice in Printmaking, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, September 22- October 22, 2017, Juried by Marina Ancona
Still Life Exhibition at Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT, September 10-December 3. Original fine prints by Jack Beal, Janet Fish, Sondra Freckelton, Jane E. Goldman, Daniel Lang, Nancy Lasar, Katja Oxman, and Richard Treaster. https://contemprints.org/exhibition/still-life/
Panel Discussion, Still Life Exhibition at CCP
Weiss Sisters Prize for a Print, Still Life with Bird and Pear (left image) Awarded by Richard Klein, Director, Aldrich Museum, 116th Annual Juried Art Exhibition, New Haven Paint & Clay Club, at Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT.
Waves, Particles, and Bosch Pear, (right image) also included in exhibition.
EAB Editions and Artist’s Books Fair, October 26- 29 with VanDeb Editions in Chelsea, NY
E/AB Additions and Artist’s Book Print Fair, Chelsea, NY, November 3 – 6, 2016 Exhibiting with VanDeb Editions and A.I.R. Printmakers
Summer Selections, Amy Simon Fine Art, Westport, CT, August 13 – October 1, 2016
Black and White, Amy Simon Fine Art, April 22-July 21, 2016, Opening Saturday May 7, 2016
Intersections, Millerton Moviehouse Gallery, April 22-July 21, 2016, Artist talk and opening reception, May 7, 2016 5-7
Nancy Lasar’s exhibit at Millerton Moviehouse Gallery was featured in an article in The Country and Abroad magazine, June-July 2016 issue. The artist was present to discuss her work and processes at the opening reception on Saturday May 7th from 5pm-7pm.
New Prints 2016/Summer, Nancy Lasar’s large print Shaker Table with Lemon and Pear was selected by curator Dan Walsh to be included in the International Print Center New York’s New Prints 2016/Summer. The exhibition runs from June 16th to September 17th. Nancy Lasar discussed her piece at the opening reception on Thursday June 16th from 5pm-6pm.
April 2016
BY TRACEY O’SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN
Friday, March 25, 2016The line is where it all begins. It is the basis of imagination, the ballast of form, the inspiration for all gesture — architectural and artistic.
Its permutations bring us chaos and enlightenment, tranquility and terror. Five Points Gallery in Torrington has gathered three artists together whose work is united in its infatuation with line: Nancy Lasar, David Borawski and Maggie Jay Horne.
But what shines, still, is Lasar’s remarkable printmaking. Her works are elegant and ethereal, testaments to the warp and woof of existence, intimate and global. The prints are alternately suggestive of deep interiors and worldwide despair. The works, with their clawing, menacing tendrils and quietly lethal stalks are suggestive of a world of terror, unbound by reason, where ribbons of ragged tracks curl, twist and strangle.
For good reason, Lasar’s works have been described as “drawing with light.”
What that means, in the case of these prints, is that Lasar plays with the opacity of print, filtered through the energy of line. It’s the line in Lasar’s prints that is always the most electrifying. They appear as singular electrical wires, jerking, swaying, whipping and buckling to some internal energy force that is as potent as it is erratic.
At least it seems erratic, which may be part of Lasar’s point. Perhaps what we see in life as capricious and fitful is actually more obvious and intentional than we suspect. Even serendipity bends to a pattern.
Lasar plays frequently with the image of a vase as a container of sorts — domestic or spiritual, it is hard to be sure. The vase, in the case of four works here, sits on a shaker table, as ascetic and fixed as the vase’s contents are volatile and vivacious. In works like “Shaker Table With Lemon and Pear,” objects and glyphs appear — hard-edged and ghostly — in the center of the vase and then shoot out, serpent-like, in quivering shafts of bone white and bubble gum pink.
These marks, which arc and sway, curve and veer, have a similarity to them. Lasar has managed to create a vocabulary of gesture that is her own distinctive voice. The balletic lines are met by images of decaying leaves or fish, butterflies or seed pods, or, in one case, a bird. They could be read as vessels of all of life’s splendor and prickliness, the tender caress here, the lacerating claw there, pincers and pillows, all alike in their delicate incarnation.
A few of Lasar’s smaller encaustic are included here but are not match for her two glorious acrylic landscapes or more sinister prints, including “Kiss Cloud,” a neat approximation of weltschmerz. As a painter, Lasar gains in expression what she loses in precision. Her two landscapes here, including “Meditation Grove,” swim with energy, dynamism and a sense of precariousness. Within the confectionary pinks, slate grays and tangerine oranges, the image of two faces — woman and girl emerge. This is the space they share, at once confined and conflicted, nurturing and foreboding. This is the world enchanting and enveloping, terrorizing and tantalizing. Lasar gets all of this through her unsettling, soothing and expressive lines. It is magical and mysterious, a glorious testament to the power of line to expose and expand life.”
November 2015
Nancy Lasar has just participated in two venues at the EAB, Editions and Artists Book Fair. Exhibiting with VanDeb Editions and A.I.R. Gallery Artists Printmakers at The Tunnel in NYC.
May 3, 2015
James Reed – Nancy Lasar – at Gallery 19
Gallery 19 in Essex, Connecticut, presents two one-person shows: James Reed: Works on Paper and Nancy Lasar: Prints & Paintings, from May 1 through June 30, with an opening party May 3 from 2 to 5 p.m. James Reed, an artist and master printer, is exhibiting lithographs, woodcuts and other works on paper. His current show centers on bold, black pictures of crows, stemming from a residency at I-Park in East Haddam, where he drew these intelligent, sometimes amusing, sometimes sinister animals and powerful mythological figures. Nancy Lasar’s work also invokes symbolic animals, whether fish in the sea or bulls on land, with beautiful, playful layered lines and colors in paintings and original prints. Gallery19 is located in the heart of historic Essex, at 19A Main Street, and is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., website: www.gallery19essex.com.
Nancy Lasar: Journalist Andrew Bottomley reviewed Lasar’s work some years ago: “In her continued explorations of line and space, artist Nancy Lasar has hopped and skipped through a number of media and forms. Primarily recognized for her explosive, well-crafted drawings and prints on paper, she has begun to take elements from her paper works and transfer these onto canvas both through paint and mixed media inclusions. This new direction presents her carefully placed images and deliberately chosen colors in a fresh, playful manner…. the artist is having fun with this work, which at a glance seems bawdy and unkempt, but at the same time manages to maintain and project an expert level of control, charging the entire exhibit with an overall sense of organized chaos.” This summary of Lasar’s work is as apt today as it was in 2005.
Lasar says “Whether in drawing, painting or printmaking, the process for me is about layering and energizing space in such a way that objects are fluid, interconnected and full of movement. I try to utilize a variety of lines, marks and media to suggest both stasis and openness to possibility and transformation.”
Nancy Lasar has lived in New England all her life, exhibiting in galleries nationally and internationally. Lasar is the recipient of a grant to study at The Vermont Studio Center and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her work is in collections including Aetna Life and Casualty, The Pfizer Corp, the General Mills Corp, the Mattatuck Museum, the Rutgers Print Archive, and the Center for Contemporary Printmaking. Nancy Lasar maintains her studio in Washington Depot, CT, while currently exhibiting at VanDeb Editions and AIR Gallery in New York.
James Reed: A recognized master printer, Reed has printed in shops throughout the United States, Mexico and France. Recipient of a Ford Fellowship and a Rockefeller Scholarship Grant, Reed has collaborated with over two hundred artists during a professional career spanning over forty years. As a master printer, his collaborative work has been exhibited and collected in museums and public collections throughout the world.
James Reed is also a practicing artist. Selected solo exhibitions include: Studio Cerqueux, Cerqueux sous Passavant, France; Alta Gallery, Denver, Colorado; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco and participation in more than 150 group exhibitions throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. His work is owned by many public and corporate collections including the New York Public Library (NYC), Los Angeles County Museum, Achenbach Print Foundation (San Francisco), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute and the Tamarind Institute.
Trained as a curator of prints by the Achenbach Print Collection (San Francisco Museum) and a collector of antique prints for over thirty years, Reed maintains a museum quality collection of several hundred fine prints dating from the 15th century to the present. James Reed is the owner and master printer at Milestone Graphics in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and also co-curator and manager of The Gabor Peterdi International Print Collection in New Canaan.
October 26, 2014
AIR Gallery
Wild Woods and Whirligig Girls is a solo exhibition of recent work in acrylic and mixed media paintings on canvas as well as prints by Nancy Lasar. Known for her dynamic drawing and interrelated linear forms, Lasar has expanded her focus in this current exhibition to include a variety of new subjects.
May 12, 2014
19A Main Street
Essex, CT 06426Lasar says “Whether in drawing, painting or printmaking, the process for me is about layering and energizing space in such a way that objects are fluid, interconnected and full of movement. I try to utilize a variety of lines, marks and media to suggest both stasis and openness to possibility and transformation.”
Litchfield County Times, Friday May 23, 2008
“Nancy Lasar’s Resolution”
Nancy Lasar 