“Larger Than Life Watercolors” retrospective exhibition of works by Zan Lombardo now at Cape Coral Art Center

This is Gulf Coast Live Arts Edition from WGCU. I'm John Davis, thanks for joining us. For the next two months, the Cape Coral Arts Center is featuring a retrospective exhibition of works by multi-award winning Pine Island based painter Zan Lombardo, titled Larger Than Life Watercolors. The title of the exhibition, at least in part, is in reference to the large scale watercolor scrolls that she's become well known for. These highly detailed works can be something like 30ft in length. Although watercolor is often associated with subtle washes, Lombardo's style tends to be much bolder, with rich, saturated colors and intricate layering, emphasizing dramatic scale and intense color while still showcasing the transparency and luminosity unique to the medium. Zahn is the daughter and granddaughter of award winning storytellers, and she carries that legacy into her artistic practice with the incorporation of stories, poems, and songs. Her work has garnered awards including the Robert Rauschenberg Power of Art Award and the National Energy Foundation's Igniting Creative Energy Award. Lombardo is also an award winning arts educator, having taught art to middle school students for decades in Illinois and Pennsylvania. During that time, she garnered a prestigious Golden Apple Award. This newest exhibition features examples of her signature watercolor style, along with previously unexpected works for visitors who may have known Lombardo only through recent exhibitions, this show offers an opportunity to see the progression or evolution of her work over time. The show opened last Friday in the main gallery at the Cape Coral Arts Center and runs through September 24th. An opening reception takes place tomorrow, and Lombardo will give an artist talk at 10 a.m. this coming Saturday. And I am thrilled to welcome the artist herself to today's episode of Gulf Coast Life Arts Editions Zan Lombardo. Welcome back. Thank you John. It's just such a nice introduction. Thank you. It's nice to have you. I've interviewed you twice on the show in the past, but it was always about collaborative work or group show. So this is going to be all Zan, all the time. I'm happy we're doing this. Since watercolor is such an integral aspect of your artistic practice. I'm curious about just how you came to adopt the medium in the first place, as opposed to, you know, paints or acrylics. Watercolor breathes. If you put enough water into the color. It does half the work for you. And so there's a living, breathing quality to it for me that I think still shows in the final product. There's a lot of blooms and blossoms which other watercolors try to avoid. It's my favorite part of watercolor and I embrace that. Does it make it difficult whenever you're doing something that involves precision, or do you just you have to know how it's going to move, right? Well, it's not about keeping it from moving. It's about encouraging it to move. So, for example, when you paint on dry paper with watercolor, it will stay where you put it as long as the paper is flat. But if you tilt the paper or let the paper curl a little bit and get a little bit wavy, it creates these beautiful puddles. And one of my favorite things that I've discovered in Florida is that with the ceiling fan right over my art table, the puddles dry in concentric rings and it becomes almost dendritic like tree rings. That's really beautiful. Wow. Have you. Was watercolor the medium you gravitated towards early in life? Like, were you doing that even when you were a kid? You know, that's a good question. I don't think I really started with watercolor until college, so I took my first watercolor class. There were two professors to choose from. One was a professor who taught everyone to paint just like him. I avoided him and went with the other professor, who pretty much showed you the techniques, and then went and sat in his office for the rest of the class and would come in and check on us at the end. And so I just spent my entire semester watching paint dry and just letting it puddle and blossom. And from there it was history. So I mentioned in my introduction, your mother and grandmother being these award winning storytellers. Tell me more about that and maybe how that maybe informed your own artistic practice. Well, so my grandmother was a bronze medal storyteller who had an incredible memory and could memorize entire books. Plus, she was really good at doing character voices. And so during her era, she was born in 1897. But when she was growing up, on Sundays after church, you went to each other's homes and spoke a piece and played piano or sang a song. And my grandmother was one of those that spoke a piece. And my mother was a hilarious writer who said that she wanted to paper the bedroom with all of her rejection notices from the times when she had submitted her poetry for publication. But she could speak a piece, and was often asked to get up at dinners and speak and make us all laugh. Did she encourage you to to sort of follow in her footsteps in terms of creative writing and poetry, since that is something that's included in your work? Yes. So here's a quick one that my mother wrote. She said, now, absolute knowledge, have I none but my aunt's washing woman's sister's son heard a policeman on the beat say to a laborer in the street that he had a letter just last week, written in the finest Greek from a Chinese waiter in Timbuktu, who said that the waiters in Cuba knew of a colored man from a Texas town who got it straight from a circus clown about somebody in Borneo who had a son who claimed to know of some swell society, female, fake, whose mother in law would undertake to prove that her seventh husband sister's niece had stated in a printed piece that she had a son who had a friend, who knew when high prices were going to end. And that's and that's as relevant today as it was then. Yeah. It certainly so. Wow. Oh, I want to kind of talk about these, these large scale works that as I mentioned, you have become known for. I read that you kind of started doing that around 2007. And, you know, with watercolor often being associated with, you know, being a small, delicate medium, you've kind of turned that notion on its head. What first turned you on to this idea of, I'm going to do a 30ft long painting? Well, before I was doing 30ft long paintings, I was literally doing two by two inch paintings. So when you see in the show at the Cape Coral Art center, the animals of the Everglades, those are 422 by two inch portraits of animals. I remember that one from your exhibition with Deb's. Watch that. That's right. That's right. And when I was standing in line at the grocery store one day, I saw an article in a magazine in the stand next to the checkout counter that had an illustration at the top. That was a Chinese scroll that went on for ten pages. And I thought to myself, I could do that. So I ordered the largest piece of paper I could. Find. Which was a four foot by 30ft arches, 140 pound watercolor paper scroll. And when it was delivered, I thought to myself, what the heck was I thinking? I don't have a table that could fit this, so I owned that paper for a whole year before I could use it. And when I started using it, I didn't have a plan, so I just made some guidelines for myself. My first guideline was unconditional love. Whatever I decided to draw, that's what I would draw. No erasing. And the second rule was that everything had to connect with everything else or be related to everything else. So I drew with a broken line, and every time the line broke, it branched out and connected with something else. So I divided that huge space of paper into small stapes that I could paint into, and each shape became its own painting. Yeah. I love how that works, because, as you said, you don't have the physical space to actually work on the whole thing unscrewed. But hypothetically, if space wasn't a factor. Is that a way you would even want to work? Or would it just kind of maybe be too overwhelming for the whole thing? You know. That's so interesting, John, because when I was working small, I worked small because I thought it would give me more control. And what I found was that by working super large, it gave me not only more control, but more ability to play, because each shape could become a puddle, it could have a little bit of breath and excitement in it. And so I definitely would work this way no matter how much space I have. You know, my studio is tiny. It's eight by nine feet. Okay. With a 4x4 foot table in it, plus a Murphy bed and a desk and a bookshelf because it's also the guest room. So I have this tiny space where I scroll it across the top of the table and roll it up on the other side. So I only get to see about four feet of it at a time. But I have been given the opportunity, for example, by Pine Island Art Association and Alliance for the Arts to roll my painting out to its full 30ft length to see it, because I don't get to see these things while I work, I have to hold all the imagery in my head while I work. So you've had pieces where you didn't actually see them in their entirety until they were exhibited? That's exactly right. That is true. And, you know, you can work on these pieces. It can take months and months. Patience must be. Years and. Years or years and years. Patience seems like a huge part of your practice. I find that it's meditative and time is really irrelevant in the face of creativity. You don't need to work towards the deadline most of the time. And so when I'm working towards a deadline, I'll break it up into, you know, 15 inch squares and say, oh, I have to finish two and a half 15 inch squares in nine months. You know, every day for nine months. And that's how I work. I wanted to talk about a bit about how this show itself is structured, like in terms of the curation. Have you grouped pieces together like based on a similar theme, or is this going to be more like a chronological experience of your painting practice? The paintings are. In this beautiful roundish. Space. Because the building is, I think, octagonal. And so it's a big circle of paintings with a circular painting in the center. And underneath that hanging circular painting is a circle color wheel that, without me intending it, ended up directing everything that happened in the show. So underneath on the floor, because I needed that brand new piece to be the grounding piece for the show. Where the wedge of violet is AMS, right at the amethyst painting of stand in the Crystal cave, and right where the green wedge of the color wheel is. It aims right towards the animals of the Everglades and the mangroves, and right where the orange of the color wheel is. It aims towards the beautiful mother oak tree in everything is reaching out to everything else painting. So it magically came together. I feel like it's just good karma if you trust the energy and the process. I never would have guessed that the space is what guide you think. That's excellent. You talked about, you know, a newer piece in here, and I know that there's pieces in here that haven't been exhibited before. Is that because they're all new or some of them older pieces that for whatever reason, you just haven't brought out before? Well, three. Of the pieces came from my living room. Okay, painted. In 1989. And those are from the Iran-Contra era. And those felt like they needed to be in the show to give depth and say, yeah, she's always been this obsessive and complex in her water coloring. Then there's the original 30ft watercolor, which was painted over a four year period, took two years to draw, two years to paint, and that's everything is indeed reaching out to everything else. That one is, I think, just an anchor of the show, and that's what I do. Most of my artists talk about the painting in the center of the gallery, which is in the round, is about the banyan trees in Punta Gorda. So that brings us right here to Florida. And then there's some new pieces that were just finished in 2026. You know, you mentioned the piece on, you know, during around contra, do you consider your art to be at least somewhat political, even if it's not overtly so? Because, I mean, even if you're just painting something like mangroves, like, like you have that piece that goes along with the 15 sonnets, sort of talking about how important they are ecologic. It's unfortunate that that might seem like a political statement, but it kind of is. Yes. Thank you for asking that, John. You mentioned the mangroves. And in addition to that, the color wheel, which is in the center of the gallery, was inspired by a written piece by a Quaker artist, photographer, author named Kai Quirk. And it's called Liberation from the Expectations of Gender. And it's about what would happen if the world only had two colors. And what if blue and green were the only two colors that you could have? Imagine what you would miss in your life. And the color wheel is about showing all the variations, all the possibilities, all the subtleties, from high saturated colors to very dull colors, from detailed things to puddling things to metallic things and saying I'm as straight people are, our lives would be enriched by not having to deal with the constrictions of living within the binary. Yeah, Well, I wanted to talk a little bit also about your former career as an arts educator teaching middle school students. This is an age group that, you know, I'm not saying it's deserved, but they sometimes get a bad rap. But you embraced being an arts educator to kids in this age group for many years. What is it about middle school kids that kept you there? It's the perfect age, John. I find that middle school age is when all of your physical abilities and your mental abilities and your emotional abilities come into full bloom. It's a very confusing time of life, but there's no better place to be. Except maybe the playground. Except in an art room. So when I teach to this day, I teach to the ten year old within every person. I love that, all right. And you know how to tap into that and find that and probably realize ways we're expressing that, that we're not even aware of. Well, what do you hope younger or aspiring artists take from your career in this retrospective coming to see it? Oh, well, first I'll tell you this I was the fourth choice for this time slot at Cape Coral Arts Center because the gallery director approached or tried to approach three other younger artists who never responded to her outreach. Oh. When she contacted me, I was back in touch with her within ten minutes when she tried to call me. I answered on the first ring when she asked to meet with me. I showed up in person when she expected me to talk on the phone. I had everything laid out. I had a maquette of what the show was going to look like. I had all my paperwork done. I was ready because I'm 70, John, and I've been waiting for an opportunity to show my work for a lifetime. So if I would say anything to younger artists, it's that response. Make yourself available. Well said. Again, not what I was expecting you to say. And you know, I have the opening reception on Friday. You're giving an artist talk Saturday morning. Can you tell me a little bit about, I guess, what you want to emphasize in that talk and what you hope people will take from it? Well, I will say this, John, that seeing my work out of the tube, out of the closet, on the walls, fully lit is a rapturous experience. I feel like it's me seeing my insides in real life, and there's nothing that compares to seeing it in person. So I would hope that people would come to see it in person and ask questions. I have a poem that's about how to invite people to receive your work. And for me, I feel like it could be alchemy about how to take ordinary supplies like color and water and paper and make things that are transformative and inspiring and in engagement ring that I'm asking you to be in relationship with me, with the work, or as a glittering to bloom for your troubles. Most people look at a complicated piece of work and think, oh, I don't know what that means, and walk away from it. But if you stay long enough and ask questions and listen to the stories and the poems and the songs, you get a reward, something that you weren't expecting. All right. Well, that is all the time we have for today's show, but I want to thank my guests. I've been speaking with Southwest Florida based artist Zan Lombardo. A retrospective exhibition of her works, titled Larger Than Life Watercolors, is now in the main gallery at the Cape Coral Arts Center through September 24th. Again, Friday marks the opening reception Saturday morning at ten. She will be giving an artist talk. For more information about the artist or to get in touch with her, visit ZanLombardo.com. Zan Lombardo, thanks so much for taking the time. Congratulations on the exhibition. Thank you. And if you missed any of today's show, you can always hear episodes in their entirety on our website, WGCU.org.gcl, or subscribe to our podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. Our show today was produced by yours truly, with audio production by Matthew Krause and video production by David Oquendo. For now, thanks for listening. I'm John Davis. This is WGCU-FM Fort Myers 90.1 WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM, NPR for Southwest Florida.