Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette studied for and received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in journalism, but went on to focus on creative work in visual art, photography, poetry, and writing about art. She is the editor of The Ekphrastic Review at www.ekphrastic.net, a journal dedicated exclusively to literature inspired by visual artwork, and her own poems and stories have been published in around 200 magazines, journals and blogs. 

Lorette teaches workshops on ekphrastic writing and on art without drawing. Her  art shows regularly at home in Toronto, Canada, including at the Spoke Club, the Gladstone Hotel, Artusiasm Gallery, the Flying Pony Gallery, the Ritz Carlton, the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, the Toronto Artist Project, Hashtag Gallery, Project Gallery, and more. She has also shown work further afield, including Brisbane, Bristol, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, New York, and other American cities. She recently participated in an international artists symposium in Tunisia, working to create paintings for the Ministry of Culture and to show in two exhibitions in Tunis and Hammamet. She also visited Mexico recently for a duet exhibition at Le Cirque Galeria in Merida, Yucatan and a number of group shows at other venues.

To read more about Lorette's art - What Becomes of the Broken Hearted

"I am driven by eclectic curiosity, and by the joy of juxtaposition. My work is a curiosity cabinet and an apothecary of magic potions and spells. It is poetry, and a surreal dream. It is the frantic pace of the city and the magnificent silence of the night. It is about love and death and the sacred and inane, and the absurdity and beauty in all things." - Lorette C. Luzajic 

Compared to Rauschenberg, Schwitters, and Basquiat, and inspired by Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Robert Motherwell, and Antoni Tapies, Lorette C. Luzajic wears her influences on her sleeve. Appropriating relentlessly from art history, advertising, music, poetry, fiction, culture, religion, and travel, she plunders everything but creates work that is original and entirely her own.

Lorette's use of materials reflects the same montage quality as the varied concepts that inspire her. She uses acrylic paint, gouache paint, watercolour, spray paint, ink, fabric paint, chalk pastel, oil stick, oil pastel, crayons, pencil crayons, graphite, found papers, found photographs, found images, house paint, plaster, silicone, pen, markers, cosmetics, glues, stickers, and any other media she can incorporate.

"A collagist is always looking, always deconstructing and reconstructing. From dentist waiting room magazines to church hymnals to art history masterpieces at the museum to nightclub flyers, my mind is constantly snipping, juxtaposing, discovering, experimenting, replacing, gluing over, scraping back layers, recontextualizing." - Lorette C. Luzajic

Her mixed media paintings have found homes all over the world, and hang in collections alongside originals by Miro, Erte, Dubuffet, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Dine, Jane Ash Poitras, and Benjamin Chee Chee.