Janet Paparelli with her brother Charlie
Remembering Janet
Tasha, the caregiver at the hospice facility, asked, "Your sister was an artist?" I said, "She was very well recognized back in her day. She still has paintings hanging in all the Florida Neiman Marcus stores."
I showed her the picture of Janet in her heyday. She said, "Did she always paint such big paintings?" "Yes, she did."
When we ended our conversation, I remembered how talented Janet was as an artist. She told me several times, while she was here in Atlanta, how she painted.
"I never had a plan. I would walk up to the canvas and paint what I painted. I don't know where it came from. There was something in me that needed to be expressed and it came out through my brush on to the canvas. That's how it worked. It was such a wonderful feeling to paint. It freed me."
Janet created over 400 paintings. They are all over Florida and all over our houses, from Miami to Atlanta to NY to London. Each of these is evidence of her self-expression. It is her gift from God and her gift to each of us.
I loved my sister through thick and thin. And while lying in hospice in a moment of lucidity, she looked me in the eye as I stood at her bedside and whispered the words, "I love you." I'll never forget her eyes and the way she spoke those words.
My prayer is in death, Janet finally came to realize how much God loved her. And I pray she will know that love for eternity.
Newspaper Clippings & Reviews
"The secret is in the expert painting, the authentic touch, the nervy, unorthodox palette...staying power and integrity...these works...have a sense of reality of the sort that is experienced rather than seen. An artist who can successfully mediate between seeing and knowing is a rare find."
"This color that does not come from light, but, in a sense, from darkness...There are mysteries here."
"A handwriting is fractured, reduced, and disciplined; decorative inventions are matured into form. In all her work, meaning is the ambition of sensibility..."
"Paparelli's pictures are the most enigmatic in the...show...uses free association to overlay her work with appealing mystery..."
"...she uses the formal vocabulary of abstract art to express states of emotion and inner experience...[The paintings in her Love Series] will come as a welcome change, because art that strives to make the viewer feel good is surprisingly rare today."
"...spontaneity that allows chance...to intervene...flair for design and compositional balance...a spiritual awareness...visual ambiguities...deny all suggestions of narrative and heighten one's appreciation of Paparelli's application of paint, use of line...and subtle use of color."
"Paparelli...espone lavori dai colori accesi, espressionisti di discendenza 'cobra'."
