When Elizabeth Lazeren Daglio begins a painting, she covers the canvas with a dark ochre wash and begins to rub out spaces she wants to highlight, then begins to compose where the dark areas will be. It’s an abstract piece that begins to take form by using color. She paces back and forth to look for changes, whether good or bad. When she gets stuck, she’ll put on tap shoes and click around, or decide to scrape it down. When the going is good, she knows it, and that helps her expend more energy into the canvas. She is trying to capture the “emotional significance” that will define her work.

A former art teacher and full time painter, Lazeren says she always knew she wanted to be an artist. She began lessons at a young age at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, a time she remembers with great sentiment, “It was a big room with French windows and a concrete floor splattered with dried oil paint. My instructor was an artist who taught me how to use oils, which I still use today.”

After 28 years as art teacher in Connecticut as well as giving private lessons, she moved to Truro where she built a barn studio. It serves as a combination gallery space on the first floor and the top floor is her work space, also referred to as her ‘happy place’. “It’s hard to tear me away from my studio,” she jokes. She works with two galleries, Gallery Antonia in Chatham and the Larkin Gallery in Provincetown-and has enjoyed success at numerous group and solo exhibitions across New England and the Southeast.

Lazeren speaks fondly of the artist friends she has made on the Cape Cod, recalling advice from renowned artist Salvatore Del Deo when she took classes with him, “He encouraged me to keep on painting, to grow, and to speak through my art.”

Her artistic style is characterized by remembrance, experience and imagination. There is a sign in the stairway to her studio that says, “Just Show Up”. Ask her about inspiration and Lazeren will say, “It’s an over used word. Painting everyday, drawing, studying art history, taking risks with color, looking at art you admire, always drawing and ‘just showing up’ everyday is the predecessor to inspiration. Do not wait around for inspiration—one will never make much art.”

A certain heady nostalgia accompanies each of Lazeren’s paintings which translates to the hazy, vibrant scenes she creates. She walks the marshes, beaches, woodlands and dunes to blend the Cape environment with her memory. “There are many habitats, so many mysteries to discover. I could walk through the marshes daily and find a new discovery every time. With that comes excitement, energy and sometimes a memory,” she says, “the location itself isn’t as important as how I feel about that place.” Thus the magical, invented worlds in her paintings make for the emotions that viewers resonate with. People often tell her they can imagine themselves in the same place or having the same feeling she had.

Lazeren’s paintings are never finished. She can put a painting away for months and come back with new ideas about it. Sometimes, she turns her attention to the same subject time and again, challenging herself to recreate a new canvas rendered from a different perspective of memory and experience. She’ll also create amalgamation paintings, such as one where she used a real Truro beach landscape, but added an unusual architectural barn she remembers while living in Connecticut.

Lately, Lazeren finds herself spending more time drawing, which she says was her winter project. She describes sketching the human form as its own kind of landscape, and enthusiastically shares her love of horse anatomy and movement. “Drawing is a practice artists have to work on throughout their careers,” she adds.

Elizabeth Lazeren donates her commissions to the American Cancer Society and to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Before Elizabeth heads back to the easel, she offers a bit of advice for would-be artists: ‘Just Show Up’ and one will be amazed at what can happen. 

To learn more about Elizabeth Lazeren Daglio’s life and art, visit her website at elizabethlazeren.com. Her work can be found locally at Larkin Gallery in Provincetown, larkingallery.com, and Gallery Antonia in Chatham, galleryantonia.com.