Married artists Ralph Lazar and Lisa Swerling are used to a makeshift life. Lisa rolls with it, Ralph tidies it up. At the end of a day, Ralph clears the kitchen table of his glue and cut-up pieces of painted card, so that Lisa can make supper. Lisa sweeps the glitter into the cracks between the floorboards, to keep Ralph happy.
The lucky thing is, over the last 25 years, Lisa and Ralph’s life has been lived in London, the Seychelles, Paris, Oxford, Northern California, Cape Town, Botswana, Nicaragua, Mexico, and in a tent on top of many a Land Rover around Southern Africa.
They’ve each made thousands of artworks over this time. Lisa’s are tiny – miniature worlds in sculpture boxes called Glass Cathedrals. They often capture just one person’s single moment, on this planet of billions. By contrast, Ralph’s composited paintings are large in scale and ambition, aiming to encapsulate world-changing events, and the mood of the times.
So how do they manage living a domestic life, while also making art from home? Ralph says “At a certain point we just accepted our home would be an art studio, which happened to have bedrooms attached. Things moving around, in a state of flux and reconfiguration. Lisa loves working in what she calls ‘organised’ chaos, I actually need order. But chaos always trumps order!”
Lisa chimes in: “Ralph loves simplicity and thinks he’d achieve it without me around, cluttering our life with stuff. But the reality is also he is a relentless MAKER OF BIG ART, he can’t stop himself. Even though he has a lovely studio in the garden, he often works in the house, with his art moving like a force-field around with him.”
Meanwhile Lisa says her miniature worlds in boxes – while looking rather neat and contained, not a speck of glitter out of place – are in fact all about the so-called messiness of life.
“My art is fundamentally trying to shift perspectives, to reflect the non-binary (‘messy’!) nature of the human condition. You can look into a Glass Cathedral and go from feeling small to big and back again, from brave to vulnerable, from judgemental to compassionate in the space of a second – never really being able to place yourself as just one OR the other – so you have to accept you are both.”
Lisa and Ralph’s daughter, Mila Lazar, a Fine Art Painting student at Camberwell, will be showing art alongside her parents.
For the first time, this exhibition brings together an account of their life lived as artists, and the bountiful art that marks the trail they’ve left in their wake.
A proportion of sales will be donated to AT The Bus, the school-based programme of art as therapy for young people in Oxford and London.
Exhibition Opening
Tuesday 22 October 6 – 8pm
About the Artists
Lisa Swerling’s Glass Cathedrals are a series of miniature worlds in artboxes, inspired by the power of her tiny people to move and delight the super-sized humans standing outside the box.
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Lisa in her home studio in California 2018
Ralph Lazar’s paintings contemporaneously document his daily life – a visual journal capturing the news, music, data and conversations that surround him. His complex multi-layered pieces fuse news headlines with song lyrics, with random miscellany and maps and lists and the weather.
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Ralph working at Kwai River campsite Botswana 2024
Mila Lazar, a Fine Art Painting student at Camberwell, will be showing her art alongside her parents Lisa and Ralph
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Mila Lazar
