The continuing vitality of Tiger Lily Art Studios and Gallery is no secret. Its members’ ability to attract congenial new partners to the group when previous members depart has kept the artist-run business going strong for 22 years and counting.
And so, when Donna Dodderidge left the group to spend more time in her home studio, a new Tiger Lily was waiting in the wings. Painter, collage artist, mosaicist, potter, jewelry designer and metalsmith Cristina Abizaid Bowman (professionally, she uses the name “Abizaid”) joined artists Julia Carter, Shotsi Lajoie, Travis Blanton, Sharon Sexton and Glenda Taylor at the beginning of June.
“They approached me, which was really flattering,” says Abizaid, who submitted a portfolio to Tiger Lily’s artist partners for review.
When the group deemed her Tiger Lily material, “I felt rather blessed,” Abizaid says.
When she is not making art, Abizaid works as an agent with Treasure Coast Sotheby’s International Realty. She is also a mother of two teenagers. Her son, Roland, is in his first year at Florida State University; her daughter, Natasha, will be a senior in high school this fall. Abizaid intended to wait until her daughter graduated before putting her full energies into her art, but when the opportunity to join Tiger Lily presented itself, “I jumped at the chance,” she says.
“Now I’m scrambling to put something together.”
That shouldn’t be too hard; Abizaid is an artist who is used to having many irons in the fire. She plans to continue to work on large pieces in her private studio (in an aesthetically rustic barn behind her 1914 farmhouse) and will work on smaller pieces in her Tiger Lily workspace. She anticipates creating dramatically colorful artworks with Florida themes similar to the four-by-eight foot tall commissioned painting on which she is currently at work. A beach scene, it features a seaside palm tree silhouetted by a blazing orange sunset.
Abizaid’s Tiger Lily work space is hung with examples of her mixed media paintings: colorful, highly decorative floral compositions, abstracts that feature the figures of horses and realistic still life sketches. Some of her artworks incorporate the flowing Arabic script that she learned in her birth country of Lebanon.
“I put those out to start a conversation, just because I was new,” Abizaid says, adding that she was “shocked” at the number of people (“at least eight”) drawn to them who were related to people of Lebanese descent.
Abizaid expects to be stylistically influenced by her new studio mates, who told her, “We all find that we start using similar palettes, everything starts blending more,” she says.
She will amply return the compliment by bringing an international point of view to the Tiger Lily studios.
Born in Lebanon to an American mother and Lebanese Christian father, Abizaid pauses just for a moment when asked what language she was raised in.
“I really didn’t have a first language. Everything was spoken in the house, but I would say it’s Arabic, French and then English. And then Spanish, also.”
Everybody in Lebanon speaks both Arabic and French, she says. Abizaid started her education in a French-speaking school, and in the fourth grade transferred to the American Community School in Beirut where she learned to write, and become fluent in, English. The Spanish came from her father, who, like his Lebanese parents, was raised in Mexico. Her father’s family later settled in Lebanon. There he met Cristina’s mother, the daughter of an American couple stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
It was Cristina Abizaid’s paternal grandmother, an amateur painter who specialized in flowers, who inspired and encouraged her budding talent.
“She’s the only one who ever said, ‘That’s fantastic,’ when I did a picture,” Cristina says. “She was the one who felt as excited about my pieces as I did.”
When the 1975 outbreak of civil war in Lebanon closed Beirut’s high school, Cristina’s parents sent her to Marymount International School in Rome. Abizaid’s college years were spent in the United States at Georgetown University. Although she received her undergraduate degrees in business administration and marketing, an important influence on the artist she would become was the drawing class she took with Father Gene Geinzer. The Jesuit priest and artist was known for his sculptural furniture, which was once exhibited in Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Before she met Geinzer, Abizaid had the habit of emphasizing detail over content in her drawings, a vestige of her childhood admiration for the wood engravings of Albrecht Dűrer.
Soon after she arrived in his class, Geinzer handed Abizaid a cigarette butt and told her to use it, dipped in paint, as a drawing tool for the rest of the semester. The blunt object did not allow for fussiness. With butt in hand, Abizaid learned to express herself with a bold economy of line.
“He really helped me loosen up, and I think that was the beginning of being able to be myself,” she says.
Her artistic debt to her old teacher continues in the spontaneous way that Abizaid begins some of her abstract art works. Four years ago, when she moved to Vero from Chestertown, MA, she began the first work of her new life here by closing her eyes. With no subject in mind, she allowed her pencil to roam over the paper’s surface with more regard for the rhythm of her hand movements than the rendering of form.
“I found this very fluid movement that I kept doing over and over again. When I looked at it, I saw these three women dancing, in the scribbles. I took crayons and started filling it in, and being very true to the scribble.”
As she worked, the happenstance gradually disappeared as the images of the dancers emerged. “Three Sisters” portrays the gaily attired trio half-seated and half-floating atop a tasseled cushion.
The picture aided her search for a way to “meld the eastern and western sides” of her personality, she says.
Abizaid also unites the artistic traditions of East and West in her naturalistic portrayal of flowers that she surrounds with borders of geometric pattern and sparkling color and sometime augments with touches of metal leaf.
The decorative quality of her floral works was “very much” influenced by the book arts of Persia: calligraphy, illumination and miniature painting. As a teenager she took the opportunity to immerse herself in Persian aesthetics on summertime trips to Tehran to visit her maternal grandparents who, by that time, were stationed with the American Embassy there.
And though she still intends to “weave ribbons of Middle East influence” into her art, nowadays the well-traveled Abizaid only has eyes for Florida.
Standing in front of a large abstract canvas in which the words “Soleil je t’aime” form a circle at its center, Abizaid reflects that growing up amidst palm trees on the Mediterranean makes Vero Beach feel “very much like home.”
