I first met artist Denise DeSpirito in New York in the summer of 2005. She was a friendly face amongst a sea of Williamsburg/Lower East Side posturing, and as far as I knew, the only girl running with a riff raff crew of street art boy renegades. Visually, her own work needed no crutches (I think she was making particularly striking detailed drawings at the time), and from what I could gather for our handful of brief hangouts, for her there was little distinction between art and life. It was all one and the same.

As it turns out, I was right. “I can’t remember not doing art or making things in some way,” DeSpirito says now, four years after we first met. Still residing in New York, she continues to be heavily involved in the local art scene (as also evidenced by her blog), and her current drawings, which she describes as being “meditative”, often stem from the bombardment of images she encounters in this very city.

DeSpirito explains that she likes to break images apart and them build them back up in a new way. In this sense, she takes great interest in the smaller details, and reflects on how “things in general are built from smaller pieces.”

To break it down further, DeSpirito describes her current work via her artist statement: “Traveling through the city in a single day, one moves through a thousand environments, from low income neighborhoods to rarefied ones in a block, watching pit bulls turn into Chihuahuas, vintage blazers turn into expensive North Face jackets, and box trucks covered in art school graffiti morph into extravagant Hummers. My work is my attempt to capture these seemingly disjointed pieces and bring them together on paper in a cohesive, beautified whole.”

More at denisedespirito.blogspot.com.




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