Art for the autumnal equinox: Deborah Lanino’s ‘Reimagining: Faith, Hope, and Love’

On a bright and crisp Northern California Sunday afternoon, Los Angeles-based artist Deborah Lanino’s exhibition of twenty-five paintings recently opened at the Blackfriars Gallery in Berkeley. Titled Reimagining: Faith, Hope, and Love, the show opened on 22 September, a coincidental yet apt concurrence with the autumnal equinox, welcoming the viewer into a space marked by the softness, colour and light of Lanino’s works.

Devoted to preserving art and material culture related to the history of the Catholic Church, the Blackfriars Gallery, part of the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkeley, celebrates Lanino’s art now through December, focusing primarily on work that the artist has created over the past four years (2020-2024). Lanino began these paintings in 2020 as part of her own meditation on hope during the crisis of the global pandemic sweeping the world at that time.

Divided into three sections, the exhibition begins by revealing an interesting ancestral connection the artist has with Bernardino Lanino (1512-1583), a Renaissance painter. In 1985, while a junior at the Pratt Institute in New York City, Lanino studied abroad in Florence, Italy. During that time, she visited Vercelli, one of the oldest urban sites in Northern Italy, which has deep connections to both Ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance.

Lanino attended an event in Vercelli commemorating 400 years since Bernardino Lanino’s death, learning from a cousin in Turin of her lineage to the Renaissance figure. Bernardino also had a prolific 16th-century workshop known as the “Lanino Workshop”. Decades later, Lanino reached out to genealogists in Piedmont, Italy, who have verified her family tree and direct lineage to the Renaissance artist.

Lanino’s connection to her ancestor goes much deeper than DNA, however. Experiencing Bernardino’s Renaissance work during her impressionable college years impacted Lanino’s own journey down the path of becoming a painter. The experience also compelled her to reproduce some elements of his style and subject matter in her own work. While honouring Bernardino’s art by showing a few small images of his work, this portion of the exhibition pays special attention to the deep connection that Lanino has with her ancestor, showcasing work she created during the pandemic that have roots in Bernardino’s paintings.

Bernardino and his workshop used classical painting techniques common to the Renaissance, including chiaroscuro (light and dark) and sfumato (smoky and vanishing), depicting traditional Christian themes such as the figure of Christ, the Madonna, angels and doves. Working from her ancestor’s images, Lanino in turn paints some of the exact same subjects, connecting to Bernardino across the centuries in a devotional way through her art. And yet her own work is unique and not a copy of her ancestor’s. Unlike her Renaissance predecessor, for example, Lanino’s contemporary paintings are marked by vibrant hues of blue, purple and yellow, adding a different dimension of light reminiscent of Impressionist art to her canvases.

In Bernardino’s Three Musician Angels Beneath a Canopy (1540), for example, created through the traditional medium of fresco transferred to canvas, three softly painted flesh-coloured angels stand with musical instruments in front of a dark canopied background. Warm colours of the Renaissance palette, including brown and ochre, mark Bernardino’s sixteenth-century painting. In Lanino’s contemporary rendition, Three Musician Angels – Glory to God (2021), we see the same composition, though the artist’s brush celebrates the bodies of the angels differently, painting them in pastels as the figures play their instruments. Unlike the darker colours of the Renaissance painting, deep blue, green, turquoise and rose make up the palette of the contemporary background. In Lanino’s work, it is as if the joy from the angels’ music is effused within the atmospheric colours of the paint.

Similarly, Lanino creates a series of female heads based on Bernardino’s Testa Femminile (ca. 1550) and Madonna (ca. 1550) figures, the latter of which are both drawn in traditional Renaissance style using charcoal on paper. In the contemporary forms Lanino creates, these images transform, becoming pastel paintings of the Testa Femminile and Madonna.

In one, for example, the head of the Madonna emerges in a pastel sky, floating alongside a delicate yellow rose, both of which are painted in pigments of blue, lavender and soft yellow. The painting, Madonna with a Yellow Rose (2020), is an acrylic on canvas that also includes a full foreground unlike anything found in the work of Lanino’s Renaissance predecessor. Flowers and grasses grow next to a calm sea pictured beneath the Madonna figure. Lanino has said that in these paintings, she finds inspiration in the artwork of her ancestor but then infuses them with her imagination to complete her painting process.

The second section of Lanino’s exhibition is devoted to themes of faith and scripture. Included here are works such as Sunday Morning (2024), painted in acrylic on canvas, which depicts a light brown path surrounded by soft greenery leading up to a heart-shaped tree; The Lost Sheep (2024), also acrylic on canvas and depicting a sheep apart from its flock, which disappears into the background of the work; and The Sower (2023), an acrylic on canvas representing the biblical Parable of the Sower.

As the Blackfriars’ press release explains, master artists such as Millet, Van Gogh and Lichtenstein have also painted their own representations of The Sower. Other works included in this section of the exhibition, all painted in acrylic on canvas, are Lanino’s: The Mustard Tree (2024), The Well (2023), a Tree with Roots (2023). 

The third section of Lanino’s exhibit is devoted to themes of pilgrimage, meditation, renewal and journey. Prominently featured on one wall are Walk by Faith, Love I, and The Golden Rule, three abstract paintings in acrylic on canvas devoted to the topics of and love and faith. In the latter two, a heart rests as the canvas’ central figure, protruding in thick paint from a star-like cross that sparkles in white.

Labyrinth (2024), a small acrylic on canvas that shows a delicate golden labyrinth within a patterned blue background, is also part of the section, as is a series of Greek crosses, each of which is made up of nine individual panels. Using her contemporary palette, Lanino paints the panels of the Greek Crosses in soft but vibrant tones that again suggest the work of the Impressionists. Best seen from afar, the nine panels of each work come together, the distance of vision revealing both the cross and the fullness of the colors.

There is a seasonal element to the Greek Cross series, with the floral imagery of the individual compositions joining one another as if in bursts of spring or autumn. Lanino explains that the Jacaranda trees of Los Angeles influenced some of her early paintings on the subject matter, including her 2008 work Jacaranda, and these in turn influenced her creation of the Greek Cross series later on.

Lanino herself has experienced pilgrimage and journey, found in different aspects of her life, including her physical and spiritual journey to Italy and to the work of Bernardino Lanino, her ancestor.

The paintings of her exhibit also represent a form of renewal and meditation for the artist, which she experienced while creating her works during the pandemic. A practicing Catholic, Lanino emphasises how both the artwork itself and her artistic production of it are connected to her faith.

Photo: Deborah Lanino’s ‘Triumph of Christ with Angels II​ (After Bernardino Lanino)‘,
Acrylic on canvas, 2021.

Anna M. Hennessey, Ph.D., is a San Francisco Bay Area writer, scholar and artist.

Reimagining: Faith, Hope, and Love is on view at the Blackfriars Gallery through 12 December 2024 (Monday through Friday 9:00am – 4:00pm, 2301 Vine Street, Berkeley, CA 94708). For more information, see the artist’s website and the Blackfriars Gallery press release.

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