Light changes as it passes through any transparent medium - water, atmosphere, glass, film, even translucent paint. It may be dimmed or amplified; it may splinter into prismatic fragments. Julie Lazarus takes note of this constant interaction as she watches the play of light on water, a lifelong passion that informs all of her art. "The first few hundred times I look at it," she says, "there are no lines, no direction. I don't exactly see it all at once until, like magic, it becomes clear." This clarity enables her to decipher subtly resonant transformations that occur as water and other elements absorb the light. As their reflective properties are changed, they change the structure and direction of light as well.

Lazarus is a painter and printmaker who also creates large works in glass. These artforms might seem unrelated, but they are simply different expressions of her fascination with light. She treats glass in a painterly fashion, composing and building it as a definitive image. Yet she can also coax traditionally opaque two-dimensional mediums into conveying translucency and reflection.

Hers is an art that demands to be seen in real life, because these qualities cannot be adequately appreciated electronically or in print, no matter how beguiling the image may appear. Fortunately, Lazarus's work is regularly on view at William Campbell Contemporary Art in Fort Worth. It has been widely shown in special exhibitions, such as the Biennale Internazionale Del'Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy, the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, and the Contemporary Art Center in Fort Worth. Without fail, her art attracts great interest because of its commanding presence. Corporations such as Omnicom, the Belo Corporation, Standard Federal Bank, and Continental Airlines have acquired important pieces, as have numerous private collectors.

Lazarus is a lifelong artist who holds a B. A. from Hofstra University and a Masters Degree in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Tulsa. As a child in New York, she was exposed to great art. Her first painting, at the age of eleven, depicted a landscape with architecture; next was a self-portrait. Her third piece was an abstract landscape, and from then on she never looked back - even though nature, architecture, and the human figure continue to inform her nonobjective art. "To abstract is a verb," she says. "That is what's really going on here. I never plan my art. I do it."

Lazarus has always been drawn to the watery places in the world, such as Venice and Amsterdam, where she spends her time gazing at the reflections and depths in the canals and the open sea. She travels from Venice to the island of Murano to work closely with the fabled glassblowers who fabricate her large vessels under her direction.

With much the same acuity as Monet, who described his haystacks and lily ponds in Impressionistic terms, Lazarus sails past representational imagery and gets straight to the actual abstract content of optical phenomena. In her canvases as well as her glass pieces, surface and depth exist concurrently, playing hide-and-seek with the viewer's focus. Light filters through the gauzy glazes, soaks through the increasingly opaque layers, and then slowly rebounds to the surface, bringing back infinite details of nature and vision.