Brenda Zappitell

Brenda Zappitell is an American abstract painter known for her colorful, gestural action paintings. Inspired by the methods of Abstract Expressionism, Zappitell employs a mixture of memory and intuition to create her compositions. She lives and works in South Florida.

Zappitell employs a mix of mediums in her paintings, including acrylic and flashe. She uses cold wax as a varnish on many of her panel paintings to attain a matte finish. Her process can be described as performative: paint brush in hand, she moves her entire body in a flowing, gesticulating, highly physical way, allowing her movements to inform the contact her brush is making with the surface.

The resulting marks are organic and lyrical, and often circular in nature. Her surfaces look worn and washed, as several layers accumulate and collaborate in the final image. No definitive plan is made ahead of time—the process leads her where it wants her to go. A work is finished when it conveys an elusive sense of balance between beauty and imperfection.

Zappitell has described her work as flowing “directly from a deep well of intuitions and impulses." Eschewing logic, she relies instead on what she calls her “primal inner voice." She is inspired by the feeling of her paints and the movement of her body. She aspires to make real the energy that comes from the painting process itself. She has named Abstract Expressionist painters like Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning as major influences, especially recalling their technique of applying wet paint on top of wet paint, known as “alla prima." Although she is influenced by her visual environment, especially the images she sees in nature, her objective is not to make pictures of anything figurative, but is rather to convey the ephemeral qualities of emotion and “inner life."