Deena Capparelli
Pasadena, CA
Deena Capparelli is an artist and art educator based in Pasadena, California. She holds a BFA from CSULB and MFA from Claremont Graduate University.
Message
Deena Capparelli is an artist and art educator based in Pasadena, California. Raised in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, when it was still an agricultural community, Capparelli developed a lasting fascination with wild and cultivated environments that continues to shape her work. Her paintings, installations, and interdisciplinary collaborations draw from art, the history of land art, landscape, ecology, geography, and botany. Since the mid-1980s, her work has been exhibited nationally, including long-term collective projects in the Mojave Desert and Inland Empire. In recent years, she has focused on landscape paintings that merge ecological histories with imaginative, speculative fiction.
Statement
My paintings explore the convergence of memory, landscape, and ecological history. Drawing on the traditions of landscape painting, garden design, and layered histories of land use, I create pseudo-imaginary terrains that blur the line between the real and the speculative. These paintings reflect an ongoing dialogue with the natural world-its resilience, fragility, and deeply embedded stories.
Each work originates in daily walks, personal archives, and over fifteen years of research travel throughout the UK, Germany, and Italy. These experiences are distilled into imagined terrains. Each piece becomes a kind of visual archaeology- mapping what is seen, remembered, and felt. The result is a layered, often surreal landscape meant not just to depict nature, but to question our shifting relationships to it.
My painting practice is grounded in both research and intuition, merging observation with invention and rendered through precise, vibrant color relationships. Areas of broad, flat color dreamily reference spectacles of manicured landscapes and humankind’s impulse to shape the natural world, while also acknowledging the interdependence between ecological systems and human presence.
I consider my work a form of visual caretaking: cultivating space for attention, wonder, and ecological intimacy in a world that too often forgets to look closely.
— Deena Capparelli