Layla Fanucci
From the Napa Valley California, Fanucci is an internationally well-know artist, who has shown worldwide, including the Carrousel Du Louvre in Paris, Le Musee de Marrakech in Morocco, Robert Mondavi Winery, the Christopher Hill Gallery in California, Andrews Art Museum in North Carolina, Chasen Gallery in Virgina, Vam Inc. Gallery in NJ, The Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York, among others.
Fanucci is best know for her UNIQUE painting style- painting cities on top of each other with a layer of color in between. The Walter Wickiser Gallery has published two books on Fanucci that introduce her painting style in depth. The books are titled " Layla Fanucci - City of Dreams Unabridged: 1999 -2011" and " Layla Fanucci - Striking a Creative Note: Passion to Process." Owning her own winery in NAPA - Charter Oak Winery. Layla's paintings are just as unique as her wines, especially the Monte Rosso wine, which is a very special wine because the vines were planted in 1880, one of the oldest vineyards in CA.
In addition to being well-know artist, Fanucci has also been recognized as a successful business woman. In Marlo Thomas's book " It ain't Over Till It's Over," Marlo picked 60 women to write a chapter each about women who have achieved great success in business with entrepreneurial vision, and Layla is in her book. She had also been interviewed by the Today Show in April 2014, CNN in December 2014 and the Food Network in September 2016.
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Layla Fanucci
Born in San Francisco in 1957, Layla Fanucci's artistic talent was first expressed in music. Fanucci, along with her brother and sister, was encouraged by her parents to study multiple instruments, learning to play the piano, clarinet, guitar. She went on to teach the guitar, putting herself through San Francisco State University by giving lessons. She pursued a degree in sociology, and graduated in 1981. Fanucci had married her husband Robert the previous year and in 1981 they moved with their infant daughter to New York City, where he attended law school, and where they had a second daughter. Four years later they also had a son. They returned to California after two years in New York and eventually the family settled in St. Helena, in the Napa Valley where Robert practices tax law and produces wine, and Layla has her painting studio.
Beginning in 1975, Fanucci taught music and guitar both privately, and in schools, ranging from the elementary to the high school level. She became the director of music at the St. Helena Catholic Church, and wrote and directed concerts at the church's elementary school. Fanucci has noted that of her many roles, it was composing music that gave her the most gratification. In the next stage of her creative life, this impulse for artistic invention was to be given full reign. In 1998, she found herself wanting some "big, live art" (as she describes it) for her home. Finding nothing to her liking, she bought some art supplies and created a large, colorful abstract painting.
By the year 1999, she was ready to stop teaching music and devote herself full-time to making art. She followed her first painting with a version of Matisse's The Red Studio, followed by two other works inspired by the same artist. Then she began to create portraits of her family, still life, city scenes, and abstractions with figures. These paintings, while diverse in character, often had vibrant color, bold forms, energetic brush strokes, and a sense that whatever the style, the painting was charged with underlying emotion.
Fanucci’s next challenge was to develop a style of painting that no one paints, in the world. She found her voice and that style in her cityscape paintings. Applying layer upon layer of paint on her canvases, searching for the colors that best communicate the mood that gives the truest essence of the city. When the paint finally dries, she takes a brush and in black, draws the outlines of the buildings, bridges, streets and people, imbuing the painting with life and adding particulars that will make the city unique and distinctive. Painting city upon city, her paintings have two, three or four full paintings/cities underneath the final works.
Luminous, striking and intriguing, her works have been exhibited in top galleries all over the world. Notably, the Carrousel Du Louvre in Paris, the Christopher Hill Gallery in California, Andrews Art Museum in North Caronlina, Chasen Gallery in Florida, Le Musee de Marrakech in Morocco, Vam Inc. Gallery in NJ, The Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York, among others. She has received numerous commissions and her work is held in private collections accross the United States and abroad. A book of Layla's work, " City of Dreams Unabridged 1999-2011,"is available for purchase on her webstie, laylafanucci.com. Her second book, Striking a Creative Note: Passion to Process, is available for purchase on her website, laylafanucci.com.
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International Artist- Cityscape Paintings: Layla Fanucci
Layla Fanucci's cityscapes capture this paradox in the city as both magnificent and daunting. In her paintings, each based on a specific city, she creates a vision of architecture piled up into a dense mass of impacted forms. The individual buildings maintain a tenuous grip on their own identities, much as the populace of the painted cities seems subsumed by the huge forms looming above them. Fanucci's cities have an undeniable grandeur, from the arching colossus of the Eiffel Tower, to the powerful curve of a bridge with the skyscapers of Manhattan beyond. Even in her depictions of places steeped in traditions, such as Rome, Venice, and Istanbul, the splendor of the city rings clear, as the habitat that cultures build both to shelter and celebrate themselves.
On large canvases, Fanucci establishes shifting fields of color, over which she paints networks of linear brush strokes, which coalesce into the forms and patterns of the city. The intuitive directness of her approach, it's painterly energy, and graphic invention all bespeak both the hyped-up excess of urban experience and something more intensely personal, expressive of the artist and her inner world. The resulting images are diverse in characher, attesting to the multiplicity of urban life and the human moods which these images seem to embody.
Fanucci's paintings have been exhibited in many galleries and museums worldwide. Notably, The Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York, The Christopher Hill Gallery in St. Helena, Andrews Art Museum in North Carolina, Chasen Gallery in Florida, Le Musee de Marrakech in Morocco, Lisa Freedman Fine Arts, 750 Wines Studio, VAM Art Inc., The Carrousel Du Louvre in Paris.
Fanucci sold over 478 paintings up to $350,000.00 She has received many commissions and her works are in numerous private collections.
laylafanucci.com
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Biography
Layla Fanucci
Layla Fanucci is an international artist and author most famous for her unique cityscapes paintings exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide.
Renowned painter, Layla Fanucci, whose vibrant, energetic cityscape paintings are developed by way of a highly unique processing of layering cities on top of cities, is pleased to announce she has reached a milestone achievement in 2013, having sold thirty two original artworks in one year.
Musician and composer turned artist, Fanucci has spent the last nineteen years perfecting the abstract, powerful cityscapes for which she is known today. Her paintings are executed in frenetic brush strokes that capture the unique character of each city that she paints, layering city upon city. The resulting images attest to the diversity of urban life and human moods that infuse each city with its unique character.
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Biography
Layla Fanucci
Driven by a desire to evoke her experience of the city, she achieves remarkable harmony in these resonant works. A musician before becoming a painter, she captures the rhythm of the great metropolis, the lyrical splendor of it's skies and the cacophony of it's streets. Looking at the scenes, one understands why people return time after time to these places, like musical phrases we never tire of hearing, always finding something new in them.
In Fanucci's dream like paintings, the relationships of building, massed like blocks, transmit the gradeur and intensity of the urban environment, framing the crowds that swarm below them. Dense, deeply felt, intriguing and masterfully painted, her cityscapes draw us in because of the passion in which they were created.
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Biography
Layla Fanucci
By Mona Molarsky
What is it about the great cities of the world that promises such excitement and adventure? Their thouroughfares and plazas teem with people rushing to destinations, yet the facades of their buildings hide the private lives, cultures and histories of those inhabiants. Cities - whether as old as Rome, Paris and London, or new, like San Francisco and New York - are hives of activity, yet they keep their secrets. The same contradictory buzz of urban industry, commerce and art has seduced humankind since the founding of Jerusalem and Damascus.
Layla Fanucci's paintings embody the mystery, thrill and contradictions of these urban environments. They lure the viewer in with suggestions of wide boulevards and labyrinthine streets, while at the same time they deflect us with phalanxes of walls and windows and shafts of reflected light. They are all the works of a multi-talented artist who began as a musician and teacher, than changed media in midlife, finding a canvas and oils the perfect tools to express her unique vision and global persepective.
D. Dominick Lombardi explores the secret to this artist's success. Part of it lies in the very individual style of her paintings and the singular way she produces them. Fanucci works on her paintings in much the same way the centuries have worked on the cities she depicts, adding, subtracting, then adding again. She builds the images, layer upon layer, often plotting out three or four cities, and burring each under a fresh layer of paint, before constructing a new one on top. Often the earlier cities bleed through the more recent ones, creating a pentimento that suggests muliple dimensions in time and space.
Another souce of the artist's success surely resides in her business acumen and her indefatigable, can-do personality. Lombardi shows how, throughout her life, Fanucci has greeted challenges head on, never hesitating to try something entirely different, if the moment seems right. In 1988, she, her husband Robert and their three children moved from New York City to St. Helena in Napa Valley to help manage the Charter Oak Winery & Vineyards, an artisanal business, the Fanucci family has owned for 70 years. Interestingly, it was after setting down roots in the bucolic landscape that Fanucci began to paint and to explore urban themes in her work.
Today, the artist's studio is nestled in a 1900 farmhouse on the Charter Oak property, close to the wine cellar where the family's cabernet sauvignons and zinfandels are set to age. The wines are carefully and lovingly made by hand, like the paintings she so meticulously creates.
Fanucci's work has met with great success, and she's exhibited cityscapes of Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice, New York, Washington and San Francisco in galleries and museums around the world.
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Layla Fanucci
By Mona Molarsky
What is it about the great cities of the world that promises such excitement and adventure? Their thoroughfares and plazas teem with people rushing to destinations, yet the facades of their buildings hide the private lives, cultures and histories of those same inhabitants. Cites - whether as old as Rome, Paris and London, or new, like San Francisco and New York are hives of activity, yet they keep their secrets. That same contradictory buzz or urban industry, commerce and art has seduced humankind since the founding of Jerusalem and Damascus.
Layla Fanucc's paintings embody the mystery, thrill and contradictions of these urban environments. They lure the viewer in with suggestions of wide boulevards and labyrinthine streets, while at the same time they deflect us with phalanxes of walls and windows and shafts of reflected light. Rows of buildings elbow other rows of buildings while neigborhoods seem stacked on top of each other. The dense architecture is sketched in thousands of feathery black lines over colors of brick, stone, stucco and sky that seem to bleed through one another like tempestuous moods.
Fanucci works on her paintings in much the same way the cenuries have worked on the cities she depicts, adding, subtracting, then adding again. She builds the images, layer upon layer, often plotting out three or four cities, and burying each under a fresh layer of paint, before constructing a new one on top. Often the earlier colors and lines emerge. She allows them to stay, embracing the pentimento as the essence of cityscape. Her painterly approach is a twist on urban archeology; while archeologists dig down, Fanucci builds up.
Despite the artist's laborious techniques, her finished works brim with insouciance and charm. We are reminded of Raoul Dufy's whimiscal landscapes, with their swaths of bright color and stenographics figures waltzing to and fro, of Ludwig Bemelman's enchanting Madeline books for children, but also of Alberto Gicometti's more sober paintings and drawings, with their restless, exploratory lines and corrections that uncover their subjects through hundreds of visual questions.
Layla Fanucci was born in 1957 in San Francisco, one of the worlds greatest cities. The daughter of immigrants, French mother and Turkish father, she absorbed their lessons early. From her mother, she gained a love of language and culture, from her architect father, a passion for design and structures. With such a background, it is not very surprising that Fanucci became a painter of built environments.
More suprising perhaps, is the ciruitous route that led her there. In her twenties and thirties, Fanucci worked as a music teacher and became a wife and mother, then moved to Napa Valley with her husband to help run his family's business, Charter Oak Winery & Vineyards.
It wasn't until the late 1990's that she began painting, first to decorate her own home, and later the homes of others. Since that time, her work has met with greater success, and she's exhibited cityscapes of Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice, New York, Washington and San Francisco in galleries and museums around the world.
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Layla Fanucci
Artist, Co-Founder of Charter Oak Winery
Much like Robert's approach to winemaking, Layla's work stems from passion for the process of painting and continually evolves. She is renowned for her paintings of cityscapes - visions of achitecture executed in shifting fields of color, layered with webs of linear brush strokes, which coalesce into vivid images of cities. Her intuitive approach to painting directly on canvas, without preliminary sketches, lends Layla's work an intense engery that captures at once the frenetic urban experience and the artist's inner world.
Layla Fanucci, born in 1957 in San Francisco, graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in Sociology in 1981. Raised by her father, a Turkish architect, and her mother, a teacher from France, her parents instilled her with a love for languages and cultures from an early age. Layla began her career as a musician and composer, and became a pillar of St. Helena music community for 25 years, immersing herself in teaching choir, voice and guitar in the local schools and churches. The search for a bright and bold original work of art for her home lent Layla to become a painter; unable to find what she was looking for, Layla set out to paint the vision herself. The transformative experience ultimately propelled Layla to leave her job as a teacher to pursue painting full-time in 1999.
Over time Layla's early figurative works evolved into the more abstract, powerful cityscapes for which she is know today. Just as Robert's hand is present in every aspect of the Charter Oak wine making process, so Layla's is undeniably present in her own works of art. Her paintings are executed in searching brush strokes that capture the unique character of each city that she paints, layering city upon city, looking to photographs and postcards culled from her own travels and her friends for inspiration. The resulting images attest to the diversity of urban life and the human moods that infuse each city with it's unique character.
Layla's dream like work has been exhibited in more than 200 shows at galleries and museums worldwide, including the Carrousel Du Louvre in Paris, the Christopher Hill Gallery in California, Andrews Art Museum in North Carolina, Chasen Gallery in Florida, Le Musee de Marrakech in Morocco, Vam Inc. Gallery in NJ, The Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York, among others. She has received numerous commissions and her work is held in private collections across the United States and abraod. A book of Layla's work, "City of Dreams Unabridged 1999-2011," is available for purchase on her website, laylafanucci.com. Her second book, Striking a Creative Note: Passion to Process," is available to purchase now at laylafanucci.com.
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Layla Fanucci Biography
Layla's work stems from a passion for the process of painting and continually evolves. She is renowned for her paintings of cityscapes - visions of architecture executed in shifting fields of color, layered with webs of linear brush strokes, which coalesce into vivid images of cities. Her intense energy that captures at once the frenetic urban experience and the artist's inner world.
Layla Fanucci born in 1957 in San Francisco, graduated from San Francisco State Univeristiy with a B.A. in Sociology in 1981. Raised by her father, a Turkish architect, and her mother, a teacher from France, her parents instilled her with love for languages and cultures from an early age. Layla began her career as a musician and composer, and became a pillar of the St. Helena music community for 25 years, immersing herself in teaching choir, voice and guitar in the local schools and churches. The search for a bright and bold original work of art for her home led Layla to become a painter, unable to find what she was looking for, Layla set out to paint the vision herself. The transformative experience ultimately propelled Layla to leave her job as a teacher to persue painting full time in 1999.
Over time, Layla's early figurative works evolved into the more abstract, powerful cityscapes for which she is know for. Her paintings are executed in searching brush strokes that captures the unique character of each city that paints, layering city upon city, looking to photographs and postcards culled from her own travels and her friend's for inspiration. The resulting images attest to the diversity of urban life and human moods that infuse each city with it's unique character.