"I recall the teachings and humanist concerns that were so eloquently discussed by my mentors in conversations about painting becoming a religious act, an act of faith, a spiritual revolution.   Painting is a conception of the world, the very image of the eternal conflict between being and non-being, good and evil.   These precepts remain a strong part of my sensibility.   I want passion to be a part of the work, and have my work be an expression of experience not solely aesthetics.   I remember the influential Italian painter, Emilio Vedova, emphatically exclaiming, "It was not the primary forces of the cosmos that fuse and explode in the paintings, but the deep impulses of the human soul." "

Richard Lazzaro  

Richard Lazzaro has been a prominent advocate for abstract painting in Wisconsin for close to forty years as an artist and teacher while exhibiting his art throughout the U.S. and abroad. During his 47-year career his work has been included in many national and international invitational exhibitions.

Fascinated with this history, Lazzaro creates marks and gestures that appear as pictographs and symbols much like the calligraphy in eastern and island cultures and the scrawling found in inner cities.   He uses specific, non-specific and primal signs and gestures to evoke a variety of feelings ranging from joy to mystery and terror and its spiritual foundation.   Many of his marks take on animal or vegetal life with the vitality of graffiti and the power of myths, dreams, and other sources of personal and collective symbols.   Lazzaro's painting narrates his fears, anxieties and desires in a language that is playful, painterly and personal fostering the free expression of the creative unconscious.  

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1937, Lazzaro studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1955-59), Kent State University (BFA, 1961) and the University of Illinois (MFA, 1963).   He taught at the University of Illinois from 1961-63, and is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he taught drawing and painting in the Department of Art from 1963 - 2001.   He has lived in Mexico, New York City and Europe.   He met Giovanna Semintendi while living in Florence, Italy and they were married in 1960 in the Republic of San Marino. They have two sons, Cary and Darin, and have resided in Stoughton, Wisconsin since 1963 where they own and operate a contemporary art gallery, the Lazzaro Signature Gallery of Fine Arts, founded in 1985.