Lisa Graziotto
Twelve Nights

Extended through March 6, 2018
​Ro2 at The Magnolia Theatre

ARTIST
Lisa Graziotto

I was born in a big city in Ontario when the air quality was still good and litter was not seen on the ground. The childhood that followed my birth was average for a Canadian girl growing up in the early seventies. Bell bottom pants, a Six Million Dollar Man shirt, a Dorothy Hamil hairstyle, and a banana-seat bicycle were some of the things that I had, along with a box of crayons with a built-in pencil sharpener. I carried my crayons everywhere and drew all the time on almost everything. Years later after puberty took its hold on me changing my outlook on life permanently, I found myself leaving that small town for the bright lights of the Big Smoke. There, I enrolled in a fine arts programme at a large university. For a while, I stayed on as a student, before becoming disillusioned with the lack of inspiration that came from my surroundings. So I left to find a mentor...someone who would inspire me, teach me, and guide my creativity to find its own voice. Those mentors were found in the many books I have acquired over the years. Encountering inspiration through from my travels, has been a major source of creativity for me. The journey I am on is one that will never end. As well, my education will go on as long as I continue to be directed by my mentors, and remain true to myself.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work has always been informed by my consciousness of being in the world. The world that I am in has a relationship to situations and activities that can be shared by everyone. My work exhibits all the hallmarks of an inquisitive and critical mind...mine.

This painterly critical pose results in a wide panorama of personal and social ironies. A woman walking alone may be all one sees, but the background shows a quite different story; and my work in dimensional figurative scheme has taken a few different scales. I work from large canvases to matchbook size miniatures and smaller.

The content of my work has been informed by years of traveling across Canada and the United States, and most recently, outside North America. I do tend to see human relationships as situations that require a second guess. That artistic vision is the basis for many series of paintings.

I work in series a lot, and that is because I tend to think in terms of story and narrative images. Sometimes a series is like a storyboard for a film. It situates the viewers mind in such a way that the construction of a story just seems very real - like, hey! this happened to me! So there is a strong empathy between the subject of my paintings and the response from the viewer.

Most of my subject matter is informed by life experiences. I painted, probably all my life and have painted hundreds of works. I paint because I wish to give an expression to the many experiences that have formed the person that I am growing up and living in Ontario and being a student of the world around me.