Collegian Online Edition

Artist explores Venice

A Fort Worth artist shows the beauty of Venice through her art in an exhibit on South Campus through April 21.

Julie Lazarus, a Fort Worth resident, said she likes to look at art with a creative twist.

Instead of looking at vineyards and grapevines like most people do, Lazarus said she gets under the plants and draws her sketches with the perspective of looking up.

Lazarus travels to Venice, Italy, for three weeks every year.

While she is out, she views the scenery and makes her sketches of the underside of grapevines. She calls this the beginning phase of her paintings.

When she is done with all her sketches, she also finds time to do some glass blowing with a factory in Venice.

Many of her glass molds are not of ordinary objects but rather what she describes as the negative space between the branches of vines.

This series of sketching and molding is a project that she says takes the whole three weeks in Venice to complete.

When she finishes her work in Venice, she returns home and begins to paint from her sketches.

An artist for many years, Lazarus said one of her first loves was to draw and admire architecture from different places.

Only recently, she said, did she discover how much she liked nature. She says she enjoys capturing the 3-D of nature in her paintings.

Venetian Gardens, her exhibit of paintings and sculptures, can be seen 1-4 p.m. in the Carillon Gallery.