Actor re-invents herself as an abstract artist

Marilyn Lightstone; a real artist in her Toronto studio

Not every artist can claim credits in Anne of Green Gables, The Jetsons and Cheers. Nor can every artist claim to have written a novel and hosted a radio show. Then again, not every artist is Marilyn Lightstone – a successful actor, author, painter, photographer, radio host and musician.

Although Lightstone, 70, spent much of her life as an actor, she always wanted to paint.

“I thought I was going to be an artist when I was a kid,” she said. “I thought I was going to be a painter, but I became an actress instead.”

In addition to guest roles on television, Lightstone wrote a novel, Rogues and Vagabonds (Stoddart), in 2001 and currently hosts a radio program on Classical 96, a Toronto radio station owned by her husband, Moses Znaimer.

Despite taking the acting road, she says she always knew she would eventually come back to visual art, and in the late 1990s, she started thinking about it seriously and began to take photographs again – not specifically as artwork, but as a preface to her return to art, to sharpen her eye and sense of composition.

She played around with watercolour, gouache and oil paints before discovering that acrylic paint was the medium for her because she likes to work quickly and layer colours.

Lightstone says experimenting with different media and styles are steps that she would have gone through as she grew as an artist if she had focused on visual art as a child. The fact that she brought visual art to the forefront of her life as an adult simply means she goes through the stages much faster, she adds.

Her first paintings were still lifes, but she grew bored and moved on. Although she never thought of herself as a lover of abstract work, she found herself involved in abstract paintings and jazz, which some people consider an abstract form of music.

“I came in one night, and instead of listening to one of my CDs, I got a canvas ready to paint, and I tuned into the jazz radio station,” Lightstone says. And then, some time after that, as she prepared another canvas to do a landscape in oils, she decided to do a red wash on the canvas.

“Then it was like I was hit by lightning,” she says. “It was one of those extraordinary moments where I kind of looked at the squiggles and figures I’d made on the paper with my squeeze bottle of acrylic paint, and I said, ‘What’s that? How did that happen?’ and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll do it again,’ and I ended up painting my first abstract painting.”

Suddenly, she understood abstract painting and what it meant to her, and she really never went back to figurative painting again.

“To me, abstract art was a journey into the unknown, whereas when you do representative things, you know where you’re going to end up,” Lightstone says.

Her studio walls are covered with her work, oil and acrylic paintings and some that incorporate photography.

In some of her abstract paintings, she uses mixed media, integrating her photography with the paint. In her Homage to an Ancient Culture series, she used both photographs of totem poles and paints to create red and black paintings.

One series of photographs plays with lights; bright lights over dark backgrounds, often together with other coloured lights, create abstract photographs.

“I had to find ones that would talk to each other,” Lightstone says.

Her art pieces display a wide range of styles, including abstract images, landscapes and straight photography.

One element comes through all of her work – the use of bright, bold colours.

People often tell her that her work looks like 10 different artists could have done it, she says.

“I like the idea of evolving rather than repeating myself,” she says, and her work clearly displays this attitude.

Lightstone likes to photograph aged, ruined walls and wrecked buildings, which she says provide the most interesting shots.

“It’s not in the glamorous that really has the most appeal,” she says.

Her photography has taken her around the globe. Lightstone has photographed people and places in India, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Mongolia. She says she is a firm believer in the philosophy that the purpose of life is to experience, learn, and expand your horizons and perspectives, and the best way of doing that is through travel.

“You have got to see everything you can before you leave this earth,” she says. “If you see the same things every time, you take things for granted, but when you’re in a new situation, you see things afresh.”

The places she goes to photograph are not conventional tourist destinations, but she says she likes to take “the beaten track a little bit – or a lot, if it’s safe.”

Although some people have told her to avoid taking photos while on vacation and instead fully immerse herself into the experience, Lightstone has found this to be untrue, and describes herself as having stupidly fallen into this idea on many of her travels. The trips she remembers most vividly are the ones she spent photographing, she says.

She has researched the subjects she photographs. For example, she is aware of the lifestyles of the nomadic people of Mongolia.

“I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world,” Lightstone says. “That’s only true to a certain extent, I know, but I try my best.”

For more information, and to see some of her work, visit ­­­www.marilynlightstone.com.

Originally published in The Canadian Jewish News.