BEST OF SHOW Featuring Robert Lazuka

May 1st marks the opening of BEST OF SHOW, an exhibition of digital prints by artists Robert Lazuka and Helen Hoffelt at the Marcia Evans Gallery. Located at 8 East Lincoln St. in the Short North section of Columbus Ohio, the show will run through June 30th.


One of my goals for this blog is to promote artists whose work I admire and another is to encourage artists working with textile processes and materials to look at work being made in all areas of art. This article is the first to address these goals.


Robert Lazuka is an artist living and working in Athens Ohio. He maintains an active and productive studio there and teaches at Ohio University. More images of his work can be seen at INKTERACTION.

Artist's Statement

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary has held my interest for many years. There is much magic and mystery in the world. In my work I try to present a moment of anticipation, when something is about to happen or just beginning to unfold - a "magic moment".

Since 1999 I have been pursuing three related bodies of work. "Spirits" is a series of archival inkjet prints depicting fleeting images of mysterious objects or entities within the landscape. I work hard to make these images look as if they just appeared in the camera lens, but in truth, many are composites of multiple shots.



In the "Personal Spaces" series, my approach juxtaposes two or three colored, textured areas to suggest illusion of space and time. These works have been called "abstract landscapes" and reference the surroundings in which we live, whether inside or outside of ourselves.


The third series is tangentially related to the "Personal Spaces" series, with a more experimental approach. These images often go through several incarnations before they are completed. I often collage images together to begin the process, then draw, paint or print on them. I then scan or photograph the images so that I can alter them digitally. After printing the image using inkjet printers, I add more handwork. The image is then re-scanned, manipulated, and printed for one final time.


The opening reception for BEST OF SHOW will be Friday, May 1st from 6-9 PM.

Textile Construction #2

Committing to make a small study every week is powerful. As soon as I completed TC #1 I began thinking about #2 which propelled me right into the studio to start work.

I decided to continue to explore Soft Scrub used as a discharge agent and see if I could get a stronger "image". I plundered through some of my truly awful discarded fabrics to find something to work with. Now you may be asking why I would look in the discard bag of things I consider ugly but I have had interesting experiences doing that. "Ugly" is a topic I will cover another day.

I found a piece of fabric that I had already processed twice. The fabric had originally been dyed a light tan and later I had tried a dye technique in response to an online video I found at Committed to Cloth which is the website of British artists Leslie Morgan & Claire Been. The name of the video is Creative Cloth Dying and demonstrates how dye can be applied and scrapped across fabric to create pattern. I had tried this technique on the tan fabric using medium green dye and while it worked, it was not attractive. It went in the "ugly" sack.

Now for a third try. I cut a section of the fabric and pinned it to my print board. I decided to mimic the way I had applied the green dye, long soft lines, but using SS. As soon as I applied the SS I used a bondo scraper and drug the discharge in one direction. The SS has been put into a squeeze bottle so I can apply smaller beads of the material. It works fast and you can see the results immediately. I repeated this pattern across the entire fabric. You can see the results in photo #2



After only a few minute I rinsed the fabric in hot water, soaked it in anti-chlor to stop the bleaching action, washed a second time with synthropol, then dried and ironed.

Observations on Process:

1. The SS is a very effective discharge agent
2. The discharge is fast
3. Unless you do some preliminary testing you could be surprised with the discharged color
4. Anything you can dye/paint/print you can discharge

The resulting pattern had a distinctive landscape reference. It looked like rolling hills and mountains with trees but I wasn't interested in that look. I turned the piece 90 degrees which allowed the undulating pattern to appear stronger. In this photo you can see the landscape reference.




Looking at the fabric you can see several colors in different values. The whitish areas are where the SS took the color back to the original color of the fabric. The tan is the original color I dyed the fabric. The darkest green is the first application of green dye and the green yellow color is the color of the discharged green.



I decided to do some intense stitching with rayon thread in hues similar to what I saw in the fabric but a little darker or lighter to bring out the overlapping shapes. After quilting, the piece was squared and zig-zagged around the edge.





I am surprised and pleased with the results. The surface is rich and textured and the color fresh and original, not what I would normally select. I see great potential for exploration with this process and I will continue for at least one more week.

Observations on Textile Construction #2:

1. Textured stitching very effective.
2. Quilting lines function both as line and texture
3. Limited palette worked well

Confession. This piece is 14/5" x 14.5" rather than the 12" x 12" I had planned. After I started the quilting I could see that the composition would be ruined if I made it smaller. Remember, no rules, just guidelines.