Elaine Lazarus

The summer before high school, Elaine Lazarus stood in front of David Hockney's Polaroid joiner paintings in London and told her parents she wanted to be like him. Not his fame or his palette, but his solution. Hockney had built a grid large enough to hold what no single frame could contain: a desert landscape seen from multiple positions simultaneously, the seams showing, the impossibility made visible. She was fourteen. She understood it immediately. The tree grid that structures her paintings today is that solution, forty years on.

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That fall, back home in Rockford, Illinois, Lazarus started high school and her art teacher recognized her artistic talent and connected her with an artist who had a studio and gallery in downtown Rockford. There she painted her first painting, a watercolor portrait of a woman in a top hat, inspired by the British Vogue magazine she bought during her trip to London. She has loved hats and painting ever since.

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A year earlier, at thirteen, after winning a Gold Key Scholastic Art Award for sculpture, she traveled to Carmel, California, saw the trees, the ocean, the galleries, and told her parents she would move there and be an artist when she was old. They said good luck kid. Lazarus moved to Carmel in 2022.

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At sixteen she spent a summer in the Netherlands as a foreign exchange student in an art program that never materialized, but was replaced with direct immersion with a family and a landscape that surfaces later in her work. At Cornell University, painting professor Elenor Mikus looked at her student's work and told her to study Fernand Leger. She saw what Lazarus was already doing: figures that function as structural elements in a system, bold, flat and load-bearing, holding their position in a composition the way architecture holds weight. Lazarus looked up Leger and recognized herself.

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At Cornell she was chosen by Stanley Bowman, one of the first photographers working with digital imaging as fine art, for a two-year independent study funded by an Apple computer grant. There was no course, no curriculum. They worked at the frontier of a practice that had no established name yet, through weekly critiques, figuring out what the tools could do. Her thesis advisor Steve Poleskie, master printer for Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg, taught her screen printing and the full weight of what Pop Art understood about appropriation. Her senior thesis, Aesthetic Confusion, graded A+, established that in the Postmodernism era, kitsch and avant-garde had collapsed into each other, and that the only original, artistic style comes from seeing and studying influences across time and cultures, not from trends, markets, or what sells, not from what's current or commercially viable.

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Lazarus was twenty-two. The tree was already in that conclusion. To earn a living without surrendering that principle, she became a graphic designer, keeping her fine art and her commercial work separate. Graphic design was the structure. Fine art was her critique of it. For the next thirty-three years, she held that line. Graphic design paid the bills. Fine art stayed hers.

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Three artists account for the visual DNA of her work. Hockney gave her the grid, multiple perspectives held simultaneously, the seams showing, the impossibility made visible. Leger gave her the figure, which is the structural, load bearing, part of a system rather than a psychological portrait. Rauschenberg gave her the collage logic, unrelated images placed in the same field, refusing to resolve the tension between them, generating meaning through proximity and friction rather than illustration. The stock tickers, family photographs, political imagery, and faces layered through the Mutual Power paintings don't explain each other. They pressure each other. That is Rauschenberg's method, carried forward.

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For thirty-three years Lazarus worked as a graphic designer and visual marketer, building the systems of desire her painting had always been taking apart. She named herself Dragon Lady for the precision and force she brought to that work. She raised two daughters. The Dragon Lady softened, not by choice but by the competing claim motherhood makes on a self. She kept painting through all of it.

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In Carmel she opened an art gallery. The location was wrong and she closed it after a year. She stayed three years, made work, and found a friendship that would redirect her practice entirely. Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, whose framework distinguishes power held over others from power exercised with and through them, became her close friend. That power distinction is the spine of Lazarus's current body of work. Mutual Power is that conclusion made visible in paint.

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Lazarus is now fifty-five and working full-time as an artist in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Mutual Power series, six paintings conceived, four completed, is the most structurally complete work of her practice: the Hockney grid, the Leger figures, the Cornell thesis, the three decades inside the visual systems she was critiquing, all arriving simultaneously in a body of work that maps how power moves between people and what happens when it doesn't return.

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She kept every promise.

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EDUCATION

BFA, Cornell University, 1993

Independent Study in Digital Photography and Imaging with Stanley Bowman, Cornell University, 1991–1993

Screenprinting with Steve Poleskie, Cornell University

 

HONORS

Gold Key Scholastic Art Award for Sculpture, 1984

A+ Senior Thesis — Aesthetic Confusion, Cornell University, 1993

 

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Wendell Gallery, West Palm Beach, Florida, April 2025

Designs by Elaine Gallery, Carmel, California, 2022–2023

 

KEY INFLUENCES

David Hockney · Fernand Leger · Robert Rauschenberg · Elenor Mikus · Steve Poleskie · Stanley Bowman · Riane Eisler