About Deb
Deb Strong Napple is a synesthetic artist who interprets the sounds and colors of the landscape into abstracted compositions in her etchings, woodblock prints, and her paintings. Her synesthetic experiences take place while painting en plein air, when colors become sounds for her. This experience now informs her studio practice and her unique color sensibility.
Deb graduated from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied Printmaking and Painting, and from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, where she earned a BA in Creative Writing.
Deb was born and raised in New Jersey, and has since lived in Tidewater, VA; Guam; the Washington, DC area; and the Philadelphia region. Since 2015 she lives and creates full time in Flagstaff, AZ. Living in such diverse places has given her a love of the variety of forms and colors in the natural world, and has helped her to share with the viewer the beauty that she sees.
Deb has won awards including the Carlson Landscape Painting Residency, the Petrified Forest Artist-in-Residence, the Woodmere Art Museum’s Pearl Van Sciver Prize, and the American Color Print Society’s The Stella Drabkin Memorial Award. She has successfully completed large-scale commissions for institutions and individuals, and her work is held in corporate and private collections nationwide. Hospitals and health care facilities seek out Deb’s art, which brings her the joy of sharing beauty and peace with patients and their families.
Artist Statement
My art has always been about a very specific type of transformation-synesthesia.
When I sketch en plein air I experience synesthesia-the colors of the landscape become actual sounds to me. On a bright day the sun might sound like high C played on a silver flute. Or the shadow under a juniper might reverberate like a low, flat note. This experience transforms my painting experience from a purely visual language to one that I see AND hear.
In my studio, printmaking allows me to create a poetic rhythm using shapes etched and carved into plates and blocks along with layers of transparent ink. I use the colors and shapes that I find in the landscape to create abstract images that reveal the power, drama, and emotion of my inquiry into the natural world.
Like poetry says the unsayable, my abstractions reveal the unseeable. Like the power barely contained in a sunrise, or the sound of a color floating over the desert. The power and sense of smallness looking out at a horizon that goes forever.
My prints transform the sometimes confusing experience of synesthesia into a poetry that dances on the paper. They are part of my “New Language” series. In them I am asking … “If colors are nouns and shapes are verbs, what will this new poetry say?” How can I use this visual language to describe the drama of hearing color in the landscape?
