The Concord artist traveled last year to the Michoacan mountains north of Mexico City in search of solace and inspiration.
Based on her aptly titled exhibit, "Sanctuary of Light" at the Danforth Museum of Art, Awalt found both.
Her lush, expressive oil paintings capture migratory Monarch butterflies as objects of delicate beauty that seem to vibrate on her canvases.
After a long flight from the United States and Canada, they cluster by the millions on Oyamel fir trees. Sunlight gilds their gossamer wings. As the wind blows, their suspended bodies seethe like glowing embers. Inexplicably they break away from their clusters falling like "angels."
Danforth Director Katherine French called the show "a wonderfully poignant meditation" on a rare natural phenomenon rich with meaning.
Awalt's work is characterized by a "free and fluid expression that reveals itself in paint," she said.
Her journey to a Mexican butterfly sanctuary with her husband came at a time Awalt was experiencing several important milestones in her life, according to French. She was celebrating her own 50th birthday while also coping with her mother's death.
Awalt dedicated the exhibit to her late mother, Hazel Elizabeth Awalt, and her father, Richard Awalt, in the catalog accompanying the show.
For Mexicans the annual migration of butterflies to the Michoacan mountains has a "highly spiritual" significance because they arrive about the time of the Day of the Dead festivities. Incorporating Aztec and Meso-American traditions, the festival is believed to be a time "the spirits of the dead" return, said French.
She said Awalt's work reveals "the time-honored technique of people who transform pain" into expressive, emotional art.
At the sanctuary, Awalt sketched and used pastels to capture what she described as a "landscape (that) seemed completely alive."
In the catalog French wrote for the exhibit, Awalt recalled, "Resting butterflies gave the impression of enormous gravity, but when they broke apart and released themselves into the air, they seemed suddenly weightless."
Awalt paints the butterflies as a tumult of color and light that conveys the irrepressible energy of a life force. In these paintings, the association of the Monarchs' pattern and the Day of the Dead suggests a cross-cultural in a natural cycle of death and rebirth.
Hung in sequence across the rear gallery wall, several large paintings, titled "Migration," "Hovering" and "Suspended Radiance," convey, in French's words, "a promise of new life called forth."
In this series, Awalt depicts butterflies as multicolored bursts of light swirling through a rich blue background.
Awalt is featured as part of the Danforth's New England Currents series that showcases works by regional artists. The exhibit includes eight large oils on panels about 3 by 4 feet, 15 medium-sized and eight smaller studies framed to suggest boxed butterfly specimens. It runs through March 18 in the Swartz Gallery.
On Sunday March 4 at 3 p.m., Alfonso Alonso, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., will discuss the Monarch's migratory habits.
In the 1970s, Awalt left Baltimore, Md., to study painting at Boston College where she later taught. She has earned several distinguished fellowships including a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. She has been in numerous one-person and group shows in the United States and abroad including exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park in Lincoln and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham.
French said she has followed Awalt's artistic evolution for more than a decade. She recalled first seeing her new butterfly images last year after her return from Mexico "when you could smell the paint" on the canvases.
"Liz is part of the current art conversation. This exhibit is our promise to viewers" to show the best artists currently working in the area, French said.
