Delfina Piretti
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Delfina Piretti is a visual artist and expressive arts psychotherapist with a studio in San Francisco. Piretti’s studio work incorporates painting, mixed media works, installation, live events, and public art. Her art practice relates directly to her work as a somatic psychotherapist and expressive arts therapist. Her artwork is also informed by her shamanic practice, Zen Buddhism and her Italian cultural roots. Delfina was named after her Italian Nonna. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Photography from Empire State College, Rochester NY, and an MA in Clinical Psychology and Expressive Arts Therapy from Antioch University West, San Francisco CA. Delfina also studied in Buffalo University’s Visual Studies Workshop. In Italian they have a saying: “Devo farlo per le mie ossa“. The translation is: “I need to make it for my bones,” or “I need to do it for my strength.” The little notebooks I carry around, found objects, photographs, dreams, metaphors, disturbing injustices, are all part of the energy to make art. I work from the feminine principle which is process oriented.
At the same time I have studied traditional atelier style oil painting. I work with a variety of materials: oil paint, canvas, paper mache, natural materials: wood, plants and flower essences. The art making moves
between paintings, installations, and public art works. My work references my Italian Catholic cultural roots, Zen meditation practice, and years of working with my own and others’ suffering- doing body/mind psychotherapy. Finishing a painting is like waking from a compelling dream, a stream of coherent fragments that is affirming and confronting. Dreams and paintings speak the same language: image, sensation and nonlinearity. I often work from photographs taken from my phone, letting go of the realism and going for the shapes and feelings. In the same way as a kid I use to make forts in the woods I make parachute tent installations, womb-like spaces that ask something of the viewer: a confession, expression, a place of origination and development.
