Selby Gardens features a show about travel

Sarasota Herald-Tribune (FL){PUBLICATION2}

November 16, 2008
Section: ARTS* 
Page: E1 JOEL ROZEN joel.rozen@heraldtribune.com
Memo: (Info box available on microfilm or pdf)

Artistic power couple Alyssia Lazin and Pavel Kapic had been holed up in Manhattan's artsy Chelsea district for more than two decades when they decided it was time for a change of scene. Soon, the photographer and painter were revisiting a condo on Siesta Key Beach. Five years ago, they became locals.

"Change is hard; most people have a hard time with it," explains Lazin, who, like her husband, had been juggling a career with personal artistic pursuits for far too long. "But if you're going to do it, you'll open yourself to all kinds of experiences." It is a lesson that the two have learned repeatedly from a life rife with migrant experience. In fact, since Lazin and Kapic met in 1979, the two have made travel a priority -- and for them, covering France, China, Brazil, the Czech Republic and Italy in the course of a year is hardly a foreign concept.

Last month they unveiled their latest joint show at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, an ode to their travels evocatively titled "Viaggio." The exhibit spans twin sides of the gardens' central mansion until December, and the exhibit's Italian name was invoked for the word's double meaning -- both "travel" and "journey." The title is also a nod to their farmhouse in small-town Lucca, Italy, where they now spend half the year.

"It is a journey inspired by what we have seen and where we have traveled," says Kapic of his own contribution. Largely created within the last two years, his series of 19 oil-on-canvas paintings depicts parts of Tuscany, Pisa and Prague, the city he left at age 25 befor pursuing applied statistics graduate work at Columbia University. Kapic has been painting for about 30 years.

"I wanted to awaken within myself the more visceral way of looking at the outside world," says the former management consultant of his leap from the sciences to the arts. "The more spontaneous way, rather than the methodical way as I was trained in school."

His current style is a graceful blend of vibrant hues and abstraction. At his home studio, a room he calls his "connection to the outside world," he gessoes his medium-sized canvases several times, then lacquers them with paint so thin it looks like watercolor. The result is an electric, often playful combination of tourist attractions -- cathedrals, villas -- and fleeting souvenirs of life in the hills of Central Europe. The swirling strokes of works like "Pietrasanta Quarry" and "Volterra Way" demonstrate his medium's surprising potential for fluidity.

His wife has been equally impressed by their time in Italy, capturing much of it on a Canon G9 and diffusing her images in bold colors across watercolor paper. Lazin, a former graphic designer who completed her MFA at Yale, characterizes her process as one of "abstraction and reflection, then transformation." Her oeuvre is about finding pleasing abstract shapes and shades in exotic scenery, she says; when arranging her prints she often coordinates the images for shared visual traits, not geographic content.

"Sometimes I'm grouping together things that were taken in three different countries," she says.

Or five, depending on how Venice and Sarasota look together on the wall. 

Caption: COURTESY ART
"Abstraction 1" by Alyssia Lazin, whose work is featured in "Viaggio." 

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