The Justice

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. Lidya Buzio's earthenware dishes often include colorful depictions of urban street scenery.

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. Buzio's work reflects her current life in New York as well as her childhood in Uruguay.

In our industrialized and globalized economy, it seems that there are far fewer artists today whose art reflects the painstakingly slow and difficult craftsmanship that was necessary for art to be considered as such before post-war art enriched and changed art history. Lidya Buzio's art, however, is a tribute to older, earthly techniques that have a sensitivity that contemporary art often fails to capture.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Buzio is an extremely talented artist who has spent years developing her art into what it is today. I had the pleasure of visiting her studio and holding her tenderly painted ceramic vessels. These works almost all contain projecting geometric planes that are made into New York City scenes or Long Island marine landscapes.

Since she was a child Buzio seems to have been destined to become an artist. She recalls playing with her brothers at the house of the widow of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, the influential Uruguayan artist. She also posed as a child for the students at El Taller Torres-Garcia, the Montevideo school of constructivist art. It is during this time that she became fascinated with Torres' sculptures and from an early age drew everything she saw.

Around age 16, her fascination with sculpture led to her to José Collell, a ceramist who at the time was developing a low-fire earthenware clay technique that allowed for intricate paintings. It was with him that she learned the technique she still uses today. She remembers the lengthy process of making the clay herself and that Collell made her create simple forms before she was allowed to create anything complex. She says, "It is a very slow process. You have to learn the techniques perfectly."

When first beginning her ceramics, she painted figures on them as the Greeks would have done. Collell, however, would laugh at her as he said, "You can never do as the Greeks did." It was then that Buzio reverted to something that had been natural to her since she was a young girl: looking and observing. She told me, "I kept looking, and [my work] is what I see."

In 1972, Buzio immigrated to New York, where she studied painting with the often critical Julio Alpuy, a key artist of El Taller Torres-Garcia. At the time, she continued to work on her ceramics in a tiny SoHo apartment where she rolled her clay on the kitchen table and then placed plywood on the bed where the slabs of clay would wait for her.

The dilemma she has had with her work involves selling these vessels. She began, therefore, by creating functional objects such as teapots and cups and saucers. She shared with me that she even ventured to Pottery Barn with a proposition to sell them teapots. She remembers, "I thought I was being really brave doing this but the manager asked how many I could make a month and I said one. He looked at me like I was crazy." Today, these teapots still manifest themselves in her work and are often too striking to actually fathom using. In fact, it seems that often it is these works which so attract new collectors, as they evoke familial and earthly sentiments.

Despite the drawbacks and her small studio, New York in the '70s and '80s was filled with many other young artists. Often there were parties where artists would come together to work, sometimes using materials they were unfamiliar with. It was at one of these parties that the art dealer and ceramics expert Garth Clark discovered Buzio and later decided to represent her.

Today, she lives in Greenport, New York, where her studio is divided into stations where she can slowly build her works, step by step. She continues to paint what she sees, which are often now the landscapes of the Greenport harbor. While visiting her, I noticed a pile of canvases that made me laugh so uncontrollably that she gave me one. They were all paintings of her cat, Pepilina, in different contortions with very bright colors and all signed "Harris," the name of her great-grandmother. These works will never be sold, but rather will be given away, as they are the antithesis of her work and she does not want to be known as "the woman who draws cats." To her, these represent what every artist does: taking on challenges and trying new things. These challenges have led her not only to working with wood but also to occasionally creating furniture that showcases her work.

Her ceramics are, as one dealer put it, "coveted and acquired … by discerning collectors [and] curators" all over the world. Her work can be found in many collections and museums in the United States, such as the Cecilia de Torres Gallery in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence as well as many notable international collections, including those in Taiwan and London. She also continues to show her work near her home in Greenport, New York.

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