In a 45-minute conversation with Visiting Art Professor Mariel Capanna, I got a glimpse into her artistic journey, fresco painting process, and personal inspirations. The multidisciplinary artist spoke of her early beginnings at McGill University, where she contributed weekly cartoons to the McGill Daily. Capanna recounted her struggle grappling with depression during her sophomore year as an undergrad and explained that she later took a semester off. During that time, she enrolled in a cast-drawing course through the Continuing Education program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). There, she fell in love with drawing from direct observation. She continued her art studies at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts in Greece, studying oil painting, drawing, and creative writing. She later enrolled as a first year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art at the age of 21 and began to pursue art full-time. Capanna received the Cresson Award at PAFA, which funded a summer of travel in Europe and a year’s access to a private studio. She also received a small project grant from the Kittredge Fund, which allowed her to spend the following year traveling 30,000 miles around the United States collecting inspirations for her paintings.
From there, she studied fresco painting in Florence under Lorenzo Casamenti before moving on to work with artist Rafa Esparza in Los Angeles. During the day, Esparza taught her to make adobe bricks but, at night, she worked as a server at a fine dining restaurant. After working together for almost a year, Esparza invited Capanna to make a fresco on one of his adobe sculptures: her first opportunity to make a large-scale fresco.
Capanna then attended Yale University School of Art, graduating in 2020, and held a post-MFA fellowship at Williams College. She now teaches fresco painting here at Swarthmore, a fitting place for her due to the school’s existing works with the medium, most notably known through the series of fresco fragments made by James Egelson ’29, which now hang in Old Tarble.
Our conversation then delved into the fresco painting process. Capanna explained that fresco paints are mineral pigments suspended in water and applied onto wet plaster. Frescoes require extensive planning and cannot be revised once applied; fresco artists must divide a large painting into several giornata — a term that describes the delineated area of plaster that can realistically be painted over the course of one day. She also highlights the medium’s ability to capture time through giornata lines, visible plaster layers, and the emotional connection one feels to the material.
Capanna’s long history with fresco led her to create multiple installations and exhibits with it as the primary medium. Her February 2025 show at The Clark — a museum in Williamstown, MA — will feature both oil paintings and a fresco, exploring themes of distance and intimacy. She described the inspiration behind the showcase: “I had this experience of my father dying in hospice … and one week later, the Eagles won the Super Bowl and there was a huge parade of celebration right there on the street … There was this beautiful, celebratory feeling shared with neighbors and a private grief that I was holding on to at the same time; I could stand on this threshold and experience both things at once. I continue to strive for this feeling, that’s confetti-like … celebratory but fleeting.” The fresco portion of the show will feature a saturated, close-cropped composition related to the physical intimacy and partial views that she associates with parenthood.
When I asked Professor Capanna about her artistic inspirations and influences, she was reluctant to name examples. She explained that her art influences are wide-ranging and evershifting, spanning from art history, contemporaries, and everyday observation. Elaborating on the significance of using everyday observation as inspiration, she said: “I’m keeping my eyes open as I walk around town, I’m looking at flowers. I’m looking at the movement of bees and bugs, looking at the artwork that my son is making.” She cites her early influences as Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings and Horace Pippin’s artworks, which fascinated her even before she started drawing. When I asked her the art movement or category she felt aligned with the most, she explained that she did not want to define herself in that way, instead saying “My work is rooted in histories of painting, but I don’t know that I fall neatly into a school or a movement. It would be dishonest for me to try to categorize myself into some school.” She says that she does not find the distinction between representational and abstract art particularly important.
Capanna discusses her approach to painting, emphasizing the importance of direct observation and the balance between formal elements like color, composition, and mood. In her oil paintings, she works from moving images, such as photographs or films, which influences her memory and forces her to paint on her feet. Capanna will continue working with fresco, both in her private pursuits and within Swarthmore, resolving to capture ephemeral emotions in her works.
