Artist Talk by Noelle Imparato March 9 Atlas Arts

THROUGH DARKNESS INTO LIGHT: MY LIFE IN 40 PORTRAITS

Noelle Imparato—Franco-American, Baltimore-based artist with art-therapy savvy—will
present her forthcoming book “Through Darkness into Light: My Life in 40 Portraits.”
She will share the 40 paintings that drive her book, along with ancestral, family and
personal stories of wounding and self-transformation, exemplifying the use of the
creative process as a healing practice at Atlas Fine Arts March 9th at 7pm.

“My training in architecture, a PhD in mythology, thirty years of Buddhist meditation,
twenty years of leading “Painting for Life” workshops and being an artist, all came into
play to write this book,” Noelle says, “but by fusing painting and writing into a single
healing process I discovered a powerful tool that can be used to burst a door wide open
onto the human soul.”

For fifteen years Noelle worked on recovering the milestones of her life through
painting. She sees her artistic approach better described by this quote of Pablo Picasso:
“The meaning of painting is not an esthetic process, it’s a form of magic that intervenes
between the hostile universe and us, a means of grasping power, imposing a form to
our terrors as well as our desires.”

She then spent five years deciphering the meaning of her paintings through writing. If
painting was a way to express her emotions in a raw form, writing enabled her to free
herself from their entanglement and fully tap into the healing power of art. To her own
amazement, the images revealed a link between traumas and psychic experiences, transforming the wounds into a doorway to spirit and facilitating genuine healing through
transcendence. “This was a truly remarkable process. I was not expressing my life, my
life was expressing itself through me,” Noelle comments.

The book was birthed through this magic formula. The forty selected paintings drive the
story, each with its own chapter, its own plot, and its own wisdom. They tell Noelle’s
story of being born in France under WWII Nazi bombings to a father who joked about
drowning her in the river with the last litter of kittens for being born his eighth daughter
in a row … of marrying a boy straight out of Beverly Hills high school who, as a talent
manager, would engineer Ellen DeGeneres’ landmark coming out episode … and of
returning home later in life only to traverse a huge family upheaval that would lead her
first to lose then to find true love.

The wealth of the imagery found in Noelle’s paintings comes from an imagination
nourished by mythic images, archetypal symbols and the mystery of the world of
psychic forces, including dreams, visions, out-of-body experiences, near-death
experiences, and peak experiences under psychoactive substances or meditative
states. By appropriating a mythological iconography and revisiting it from the
perspective of her personal history, the artwork transposes a woman’s life to the register
of the mythic.

Wanting to share her discovery with others, Noelle quickly started leading her “Painting
For Life” workshops. Her teachings are best described in her own words:

“Entering the studio, we quiet our mind and focus on the emotional layers buried in our
body and rarely touched. With honesty and integrity we allow whatever image wants to
arise to arise. Letting go of control is the most difficult thing of all. It takes courage to
disclose our deepest secrets onto a large canvas, but bringing darkness into light is part
of becoming whole.”

Details about the event can be found here.