My recent works are tied up in painterly romanticism, while trying to eschew all of it. Paint is substituted for charcoal and water. Space is relegated to the distance between me and the wall. Touch is limited to the smashing and scraping of dust. Figuration is used only for depicting stomachaches, energy drinks, and skepticism.

Since I continue to discover profound parts in each painting I make, I question if a painting can ever be complete. In positioning my work in the world, I accept past failures with the hope of success in the present and future. I read into my work by looking at it. I instinctively connect to feelings of intensity, tension, and contact. In my work, the physicality of the paint collides with the comfort of illusion.

Each of Zappitell’s paintings is a long journey of gestures. Completely filling canvases or panels with innumerable layers of deliberate, vigorous brushstrokes, she shares an affinity with abstract expressionists such as Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. However, her paintings are fully informed by her life experiences—from being a wife and mother to traveling the world to the meditation practice of finding the pause. The colors she selects subconsciously reflect these experiences, such as the glowing oranges and reds that followed a trip to Africa.

My paintings depict hybridized spaces in vivid colors, alternately fragmenting and coalescing. I consider play and discovery important components of both the execution of the painting and the viewer’s experience with it. I position my viewer as an explorer and navigator roaming through various spaces coexistent within a single composition, addressing the potential for fluidity between the material and the virtual.

The pieces in High Lonesome arose while I was working on another series. Using charcoal, charcoal powder, archival tape, paper, and various ephemera, I noticed how the oils from my hands left unique marks on the paper, how I made minor scratches in the substrate as I moved my hands and tools, how the torn and cut tape pieces were in dialogue with each other, and how the color differences between the paper or Claybord interacted with the charcoal powder and artist’s tape. I saw a quiet beauty in these occurrences, so I decided to dedicate an entire series to them.

My work embraces Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias: sites that mirror, distort, and invert other spaces. The painted gestures nod to the mindfulness of the human mark within a space reminiscent of the void in Asian landscape painting. The gestures bear the uniform of regional textile designs, referring to a worldwide textile trade that for centuries has been a complicated narrative of migration, hierarchy, and power. This trade assigned the “East” with exotic mystery and identified it significantly as “the other.” The nonverbal aesthetics of textiles transcends

My paintings and sculptures explore my changing relationship with myself and with my mother as she succumbs to a brain disease called fronto-temporal degeneration. Hugging bodies reveal the simultaneous enmeshment and separation that occurs in caring for her. Dark humor and the use of exaggerated facial features allow for the expression of the layered emotions experienced in such an ambiguous loss: despair, longing, disbelief, and even hope. This focus on myself is not meant to lessen the importance of my mother’s experience of the disease,

In my drawings, paintings, and wall installations, I obsessively render a continuous line to create intertwined, tubular forms. As I draw, I consider the effect of how the transmission of fluids and gases, along with pressure and gravity, would influence these imagined forms. The forms are layered, and they loosely follow aspects of linear perspective to become networks that reference the vast and intricate transportation, processing, and refining systems of oil, natural gas, and water as seen in our industrial landscape.

My objects consist of dichotomies. Translucent textiles over wooden frames offer a delicate surface with an assertive support. Paint application is nuanced in some areas and clumsy in others, shifting back and forth between ethereal stains, loud color, and material textures. Shapes shift between the organic and the geometric, the nonrepresentational and the slightly familiar. Similar gestures take form in three-dimensional works that lean against walls or stand lightly on their own. Plywood, covered or left bare, is cut to evoke the abstract paintings, but also furniture

I gather the pieces of my paintings through a series of habitual actions: 1. I fill sketchbooks with quick line drawings of words, objects, and patterns. I make the drawings while attending to tasks like making dinner, giving my son a bath, or writing a syllabus. 2. I tear off the front panels of cereal boxes, six-pack containers, and old birthday cards to use as material for an ongoing series of small, fast, early morning collages—my daily visual calisthenics.