Cecilia Chiappini creates paintings with no preliminary sketches and instead allows her work to develop around a set of replicated shapes. Using gouache and water on unprimed muslin, she allows paint to permeate the surface of the material and transform it from within. Her refusal to adhere to artistic norms such as preliminary sketches or drafts allows her to confront the work as an embodied and vulnerable conversation between painter and painting. Using a wet on wet technique, she works to excavate the forms embedded in the painting by accentuating or altering shapes made by the movement of gouache through the warp and weft of the muslin.
Cecilia Chiappini is a painter and poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She has a bachelors in art history and French from Reed college with a focus on early modern material culture, specifically clothing and architecture. Cecilia paints using gouache and water on unprimed muslin and finds inspiration in diaphanous materials and non-materials such as tulip petals, light and shifting sands.