Brenda Hope Zappitell

What Do You Want?

2024

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. Her work is finished, when it conveys an elusive sense of balance between beauty and imperfection. She 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. Zappitell is inspired by the feeling of her paints and the movement of her body. 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. Zappitell has exhibited extensively in galleries across the United States. She was featured in New American Paintings in 2016. Zappitell's work is in several public collections, including that of the Boca Raton Museum Of Art, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, the St. Regis Hotel, NYC, the Hard Rock Hotel, Tampa, FL and DoubleLine Capital, Los Angeles, CA.