You do not explain a picture; you fall in love with it!

With the Newington Award-winning painting

Gerald Lazare has been painting the urban scene for over

25 years. His pictures are visual poems about the city and

its inhabitants. "I have always been a lover of cities and

find the human comedy is played out in infinite variety

on a city stage." Barney McKinley, the Toronto art critic

wrote, "Lazare is an artist of great intensity who portrays

everyday places and people with a clarity all his own."

Unable to commit himself to design-oriented abstractions

of the 50's and 60's, he exercised his love of illustration

and its great practioners by creating hundreds of pictures

for books and magazines in Canada, the U.S.A. and

Europe. The Canadian Scene, dominated by landscape

and abstraction, had little effect on his love of painting

the city. His muse took him to England, France and Italy

to work and study. The great galleries of Europe and

New York became his school. Louise Bardotes Brown

wrote in Art Magazine, "Lazare's works have an uncanny

sense of classical serenity. There is something brilliantly

real and magically beautiful about his pieces."

Cathy Shaffter in the Ottawa Citizen affirmed, "His paintings of a passenger on a bus, a waitress,

musicians in a mall, open our eyes to the most ordinary marvels. He feels enough empathy for people in

the city to depict them with perfect candor."

Portraiture also occupies a large place in Lazare's career and he has executed many commissions and

portraits of friends and family. He is especially proud to have received the Salmagundi Club award for

portraiture at the American Artist Professional League's grand National Exhibition in New York, 1996. He

is a member of the league and won the Newington Award/Best Painting in Show in 1994.

Lazare feels great art is timeless and has more to do with the imagination and personality of the artist than

technique. He has never been swayed by trends and has remained from the beginning true to his kind of

art, a strong painterly realism that is often, like his view of life, "bittersweet."

Gerald Lazare taught at the Ontario College of Art for many years, both in Toronto and at their off-campus

in Florence, Italy. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections. He has lectured

extensively on his own work and 19th century painting in general. He was also the recipient of The

Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators in Communication's Lifetime Achievement Award

in 1995. Gerald’s latest award ironically goes back to his very beginning when he left high school at the

age of 16 to create comic strips for Bell Features in Toronto. These became legendary as the “Canadian

Whites”. The Joe Shuster Awards, inducting Canadian comic creators into the Hall of Fame, was awarded

to Gerald on June 9, 2007. The awards committee summed up his career this way: “As a cartoonist,

illustrator, teacher and fine artist, Gerald Lazare fills a sizeable chapter in the history of Canadian art.”