“my work captures moments of emotional & spiritual energy as competing energies battle to transform environments and alter states of mind. I aspire to inspire and to be inspired,
to share “joie de vivre”!”
-DI NAPOLI
bio
Catherine di Napoli is an American “abstract impressionist” painter working from her atelier in Paris, where she has established a practice rooted in the philosophy she calls luminous origin — the belief that beneath all form lies a luminous source, and that painting is the act of channeling it into the visible world.
Born of southern Italian heritage and shaped by years between California, Hawaii, and Paris, di Napoli brings a rare cultural depth to her work — one that holds the ancient and the elemental alongside the lyrical and the contemporary. Her practice is organized around distinct series — Makai, Verde, Mono No Aware, Pyrolle, and Luminous Origin — each an inquiry into a different quality of energy: oceanic, vital, transient, primal, celestial.
Di Napoli came to painting through film: she co-wrote and produced ((UNTITLED), a comedy set in the world of contemporary art and music, The Architect, Bartleby, and The Californians. Her work has been exhibited at the Four Seasons Hualalai, the Westin Hapuna Prince Hotel, and Tiffany’s Art Gallery in Hawaii, and has entered private collections throughout the United States and Europe. She was artist-in-residence with the City of Palo Alto and at NELHA, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii.
Raison d’etRE
Making art is my raison d’être, my life’s purpose en par with family, my secret mistress..
I paint energy. Not as metaphor — as fact.
When I am in flow, source moves through me into my creative endeavors. Each work carries the frequency of a specific energy — felt in the body, perceived in nature, transmitted through light — infusing any space it inhabits with its living charge.
My practice is built on the conviction that matter and spirit are not opposites but a continuum, and that the function of art is to make that continuum visible. Within each painting is an opening — held space where the mind can rest and the deeper registers of perception begin to stir. This is why I favor the abstract: like poetry, it meets the viewer where they are.
My newest series, Luminous Origin, explores that crystalline space accessed from the heart. I breathe into the magical, eternal — weaving soul force through the body, suffusing more soul and life force into the world and into my creations, until the canvas holds that frequency.
I work from my Paris atelier and sometimes outdoors in the light of this city. Its particular quality of grey turned luminous has become essential to my recent work. The work is made for spaces that hold a reverence for beauty: not as decoration, but as necessity.
joie de vivre
ARTIST’S STATEMENT for Ground 14
This piece is depicts the vibrant energy I often feel throughout the day. When it gets this intense it’s time to meditate. This painting marks a significant time in my life when I started painting genuine energy, no longer worrying about making aesthetically pleasing work for an audience.