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Sunday, February 16, 2003

About a month ago, Mary Mazziotti sent me a postcard of a painting from "The Importance of Food," a show of her work currently at the Mendelson Gallery, Shadyside.

In the picture, three young women wearing big white chefs hats and dressed in low-cut halter tops that show their cleavage each had both hands on the rim of a big metal bowl.

Who were these pretty girls, and why did I think I knew them? How come they were smiling? And another thing -- what was in those three bowls?

The bowls were the size we used for mixing bread dough when I was a student at the Culinary Institute of America, a professional chefs school in Hyde Park, N.Y. One day in the dining room I reached for a roll just as another student came along, grabbed up the bread basket and left me empty-handed. Hey, what was happening? It seemed that someone had stored liquid soap in an empty vegetable oil container, and before anyone discovered the error, a group of students had used that powerful detergent to grease the mixing bowls for the bread we were about to eat.

That's why the bowls in the postcard got my attention. What was in them? Grains. But what kind? Holding the postcard this way and that, I gave up trying to identify them, put on my hat and coat and went to ask Mazziotti.

Her studio is three flights up in a building on the West End that you might hesitate to enter alone. But once inside her space, there's Igor.

"My assistant," Mazziotti says.

Igor stared. When I took a seat, he was in my lap, despite the scent I carry of my aggressive German shepherd. This was not the most surprising thing about this cat. Called by name, he hurries over. I've never known a cat to obey.

"How come he does?" I asked Mazziotti.

She thought about it.

"Because he doesn't know that he shouldn't," she said.

To questions about her art, Mazziotti's responses were similarly forthright, indicative of a woman who works alone and, having no need to dissemble, says what she thinks.

As she did in the roomful of cowgirl portraits. Asked what the inspiration had been for painting them, she shrugged.

"Nothing in the West resonates with me except the girls." she says.

The cowgirls, on horseback, roping steers, in a dance-hall, and the beautiful bow-lipped, pistol-packing Texas Guinan, entered her unconscious as a poem enters a poet's, and she went to work. In the pictures, each woman, to whom she's given the name of a goddess, stands in front of an intensely blue sky. Same Western sky for all.

As had the three girls on the postcard, the cowgirls look familiar. Mazziotti explained why. B-movie stills were her inspiration, and the pictures were painted for someone like me who grew up loving cowboy flicks.

It had once been my plan to open a restaurant in Midland, Texas, with a movie theater attached, and to screen Westerns 24 hours a day. You could take your "grub" into the theater and watch Richard Widmark films from morning till night. For me, he was the most convincing cowboy of them all.

Mazziotti's habit of looking to the past continued for her "Importance of Food" series. This time it was advertising art from the '30s and '40s women's magazines that inspired her.

"In these old food ads, the models in their apron-covered housedresses were ludicrously enthusiastic about whatever it was they were promoting. 'Yummy,' 'Swell,' 'Wow,' were the words used in the ads. To give the same significance to the food, I used special effects."

So it was that the heaps of grain in front of the pretty girls, was glitter and tiny beads applied with Mod Podge glue.

And in another picture, the burger that a handsome man in a business suit is eating from a gold-sequined bun is made of fur.

For the series, what is almost certainly the motherly Certo lady has been given a new persona. In ads, we were accustomed to seeing her hold up a bottle of pectin assuring us of its value in setting jams and jellies. Now our matronly model is drinking from the bottle with its label changed to read Perko. When she swallows all the glitter in that bottle, it won't be "Yummy," "Swell" or "Delicious" she'll say, but maybe "Wow."

The 13 paintings in the series memorably illustrate the artist's statement: "Do we expect too much of food? Can it make us happy, healthy, young, sprightly and desirable?" Mazziotti's answer is "yes."

With such dedication to her work, it's interesting that she didn't start out intending to make art her career.

"I got encouragement from my high school teacher, but oh no, I said, not art. I intended to be a famous actress."

For this, she went to Carnegie Mellon University, graduating from the drama department.

"I was so bad," she says, the very idea of how bad makes her almost gleeful. "Really terrible. And because of it I couldn't get any work. I finally took a job as a go-fer at Filene's and then, eventually an advertising copy writer. I traveled when I could, mostly in the Middle East and Asia. I continued to write copy until I was burned out. Then I thought of art. I've always liked art. So I went back to it."

Her work is shown both at the Mendelson Gallery and at the OK Harris Gallery, New York City.

Almost every painting is on wood. "Not every painting is a good one," she says. "I paint over the ones that aren't."

"I have a good life," Mazziotti says about spending her days alone, working. "I have my easel, my brushes and paint and my funky ideas. I have my books on tape. I have Igor. It's lovely to have an animal when you're alone all day."

In the evening, she joins her architect husband in the house they are renovating in the West End.

Mendelson Gallery, 5874 Ells-worth Ave, Shadyside. 412-361-8664. Exhibition continues through Feb. 28.