Alan Crichton – Dreams of Reality: Gardens of the Heart—The Art of Joe, Lynn, and Max Ascrizzi

An Encounter

I arrived at Green Acre Baha’i Center of Learning in Eliot, Maine, about 5:45 p.m. on Saturday 3 May, thinking I was quite a bit late for the opening. To my surprise, the huge hall was totally empty, except for a flock of hundreds of multi-colored origami paper birds flying overhead among the dust motes of a timber-framed vault. I called out several “Halloos!” to a slight echo, but no footsteps, just silence. Was I so late that everyone had been there and left? Was there a reception elsewhere?After a phone call revealed that I’d been nearly an hour early for the opening, I thought I was alone . . . but far from it.

Life sometimes unexpectedly drops one into spaces free of time, free of others and their distractions, where aloneness is a spiritual luxury and simple beingness in the moment can seem miraculous and transcendent. One is mistakenly an hour early, and everything lights up with a sudden presence.

In that fresh silence, my whole self gradually opened to an unexpected, intimate encounter with the sculptures, paintings, and poetry of three very dear friends. The late Joe and Lynn Ascrizzi and their son, Max, were exhibiting for the first time together, each as artists in their own right, but each with the deep living thread of art in common. The Baha’i hall’s great emptiness offered me a unique communion with these friends—a weaving of dimensions in time, space, and spirit.

Max is a vitally alive and accounted for artist, musical composer, and maker of many creative works, and though we lost Joe in 2021 and Lynn in 2024, their lives continue to shine together through their art.

Through our five decades of friendship, I’ve noticed a spiritual current that flows through the Ascrizzis’ lives, and in that May Saturday silence at Green Acre, I felt it again as I experienced each of them as individuals in a new conversation together. I felt their welcome, inclusion, blessing, observation, recognition, acceptance, intuition, humor, forgiveness, imagination, grace, understanding—those truths of unadorned caring for one another that bind us all.

Lynn’s poems, mounted on elegant pedestals carefully placed throughout the exhibit, are almost like sculptures in themselves, and her words have the heft and feel of life. “Hard Ground,” a paean to “all that is small / and unkindly regarded, / . . . but leaps back . . . / bringing its color, gift and glory / to every bleak and trafficked place,” is an affirmation of the persistence of hope and beauty, even in the midst of affliction and oppression—a feeling that seems particularly appropriate for artists to keep in mind today. Though she wrote the poem years ago, oppression continues to haunt us, and artists and poets continue to pierce every darkness with beauty.

Lynn’s meditative, large color drawing, Screen, brings together closely observed domestic scenes of the flow of time where a distant moon over one lone boat on a buffeting sea is glimpsed through an arch in an ancient wall reached only along a path through a field of skulls and bones. A rose-flowered robe flung over a hinged dressing screen hides file drawers full of memories while white poppies in full bloom spill down to bring the eye full circle. It’s a dream, really, where each hinted mystery receives its own attention and care in finding its natural place.

On encountering Joe’s astonishing and sublime box sculptures for the first time years ago, I was suddenly moved to tears by the deep sense of connection to humanity with all our many layers, harmonies, and cacophonies. Joe was uniquely primed to listen for, and especially to hear, the cryptic messages that whisper to us from trees, bones, fire, the sea and its many clouds. He brought vision to our dreams for soul to soul connection across the great cycles of past and future lives. Like Lynn, he saw a persistence of hope and beauty in small, scrappy things like the blind toil of insects chewing their cambium calligraphy under the bark of an oak. Often, he brought thorns together with gold and scratched gesso epics of ships and sailors, giants and journeymen, divine griffins and winged genies, and always the wondering, wandering spirit that is each of us. His many sculptures and paintings continue to feel as relevant and fresh as with their first viewing.

Max Ascrizzi’s paintings in this exhibit are brand new, iconic, mysterious, questioning, and interwoven with dreams, as well. They feel momentous, with the future in full suspension. In Blessed Among Stables, a huge blackbird, wings outstretched before a rising, full moon, hovers above two stark white trees laden with apples and leaves. Pathways through the landscape lead up a distant hill to the clear dark blue of a starless sky suspending the light grey moon. The image is magical, abundant, momentous, suspended with anticipation.

In Each Separate Dying Ember, another blackbird with torso close against the picture plane perches on a wire fence in a prairie landscape quickly receding to far-distant mountains. Dark with contemplation, the bird confronts us while near and far dimensions quickly shift space. The bird’s head breaks into, perhaps, his own dream above of a blue and white checkerboard floor bordered with a gallery of five columns, each entwined with a huge snake. The image awaits, even challenges a new presence, a new story to appear.

These three deeply connected lives continue to flow and interweave. Art is a powerful force for connection and understanding, a force that transcends loss and the limitations of time. Art forever embodies the spirit of its maker. I have been privileged to encounter the Ascrizzi family and know that we will be friends forever.

 

The exhibition Dreams of Reality: Gardens of the Heart, runs through 9 June 2025 at Green Acre, Eliot, ME.

Biographical Note

Joe and Lynn arrived in Freedom, Maine, around 1974 from Connecticut, where Joe had worked as a framer and restorer of artworks for many artists, museums, and galleries. Trained as a painter at the New York’s School of Visual Arts and in medieval art techniques in Florence, Italy, Joe evolved his own intuitive library of nearly mystical possibilities that brought the ancient into surprising harmony with the contemporary. In Maine, Lynn became an art teacher, a Lifestyle editor and feature writer for Central Maine newspapers, and a published poet who won the 1999 Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship.