The Rabbit in the Hat Painting

We believe 'Peter Rabbit' because Beatrix Potter believes it. You have to.” Nikki Giovanni This artwork explores the strange history of creepy, quirky rabbits in illustration and art, where weird rabbits appear throughout children’s literature and vintage photography. The artist is always examining the gamut of symbolism, approaching the spectrum of meanings playfully. Bunnies are widely loved and a staple of fables, folklore, and mythology the world over, the rabbit connected to the moon, good luck, fertility, being in a hurry, or new beginnings, as well as to ranging qualities like sensitivity, gullibility, and the ominous. The artist layers collage pieces from her collection of imagery and text, drawers and boxes of found papers she gathers everywhere she goes. She finds joy in juxtaposition. Letters and numbers have visual texture, and she submerges them in fields of acrylic and spray paint, pastel marks and gestures. Snippets of poetry are scrawled like graffiti. The anthropomorphic impulse – to give human qualities to animals- is a familiar feature in fairy tales and surrealist art, and here the iconic odd rabbit is taken from the green meadows to become a fixture of the urban environment, a chalk outline on the tagged and painted landscapes of the city wall. This work is for the collector who loves urban expressionist artworks and whose dreams are populated with fantastical creatures, city streets, and rich layers of symbolism. "A superhuman effort to coalesce the imaginative world." Moray Mair, Mutant Space Arts "Luzajic, like Wonder Woman, is her own institution." Paul Robinson, Blog Critics "Queen of the fantastic." Carrie Shibinsky, Art Bomb Daily Statement: Compared to Rauschenberg, Schwitters, and Basquiat, and inspired by Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Robert Motherwell, and Antoni Tapies, I wear my influences on my sleeve. Appropriating relentlessly from art history, advertising, music, literature, culture, religion, and my travels, I plunder everything to create original work that reflects my own experiences as a woman and as an artist. 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 filled with poetry, grief, the broken shards of faith, all that I have seen so far, and a veritable lexicon of fragmented symbols. 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. bio: Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning mixed media visual artist living in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from Ryerson School of Journalism but went on to pursue her passion for collage, paint, art history, and poetry. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries, museums, restaurants, hotels, banks, laundromats, art fairs, in dozens of literary and arts journals, as a prop on Save My Reno on Home and Garden Television, in an ad campaign for Madrid-based luxury diamond jewelry designer Carrera Y Carrera, as a 20 foot billboard in New Orleans, and at the Royal Ontario Museum. In 2017, she was invited to participate in an international artists symposium in North Africa, as a guest of the Tunisian Ministry of Culture. In 2018, she was awarded a $5000 honorarium for Best Painting by E11even Restaurant and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. She has been a featured guest on The Artist’s Voice and The Savvy Painter podcasts. Lorette is also a widely published poet, nominated twice each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and she is the editor of the arts journal, The Ekphrastic Review at . She teaches mixed media workshops with clients at the Centre For Addiction and Mental Health, where she was once a patient. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally and is purchased by collectors from all over the world. Her work hangs in collections alongside originals by Miro, Erte, Dubuffet, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Dine, Jane Ash Poitras, and Benjamin Chee Chee. Copy and paste to view a short film about Lorette’s art, by Val Peter and Kyle Robinson at Artists Unknown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbLL94Abd4k&t=39s