/ WORK AVAILABLE BY
Dolores Chiappone
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“I paint things that are both symbolic and real. It’s very shamanistic, moving back and forth between dimensions. I don’t see realms as being separated. I have painted many still lifes, but I’ve never set up a still life to paint. Likewise, I don’t paint or sketch outdoors. Instead, I go outdoors, walk, observe deeply, and feel the trees. Then I come back to the studio and paint the trees.” - Dolores Chiappone
Dolores Chiappone was born in Rochester, New York in 1931, was raised in Los Angeles, and died in Arizona in 2025. As a creatively inclined child, her father taught her to restore wood furniture, and she soon began decorating the pieces she worked on with paintings. The act of making thrilled her, and from that point she knew she wanted to be an artist. Circumstances kept her out of art school, so she trained herself, reading and studying paintings in books. She drew on the range she found there: Hieronymus Bosch, pre-Columbian art, the decorative allegories of François Boucher, eighteenth century classical realists and animaliers, Rousseau's primitivism, Magritte's fantasies, and Caravaggio, for his handling of light and his attention to physical and emotional states.
By 1957 Chiappone was a young housewife and mother of two. She suffered a nervous breakdown, brought on by violence at home and compounded by postpartum depression after her second child. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Oscar Janiger, advised her to separate from her husband and her parents for her own survival. After her release, her husband took her to Mazatlán, Mexico, and left her there with the two children. Unable to care for herself or for them, she was retrieved by him a month later. On their return to the United States she was judged an unfit mother by her husband's parents and was persuaded to give the children up to them to raise.
She returned to Los Angeles in 1958 and resumed therapy with Janiger, who for several years had been running clinical studies into the therapeutic uses of LSD, including research on its effect on artists and their creative process. He included Chiappone. Subjects were given a dose and asked to draw an object in his office repeatedly. As the drug took hold the drawings grew looser and more abstract, tracking the shift in motor control and mental state. Janiger recognized how much she needed to make art and introduced her to others with the same interest. The group met at a writer's house at Big Bear Lake, outside Los Angeles, where they took LSD and sat outside under the stars. Chiappone described the sensation as "coming apart into a billion little pieces, the fragments of my being returning into a new form." She spoke about the drug in positive terms. "LSD changed who I was dramatically, and it allowed me to survive."
Her mature style dates from this period. She considered Untitled, painted in 1959 in her late twenties, the foundation of everything that followed. It shows a woman coming apart into a filigree of patterns, spirits, and phantoms, a world in motion that breaks up and recombines in unexpected ways.
Her use of LSD ended in 1960 with a session she recalled sixty years later as the most intensely beautiful and profound experience of her entire life. Even so, she thought the paintings made under its influence were poor. Colors looked supernaturally alive while she worked, and dull once the effects wore off. She stopped, and went back to Mexico, where the work fully opened up. From 1960 she moved between Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, and Tlaquepaque, the artists' community in the mountains near Guadalajara, looking for the time and space to work across mediums and at every scale from miniature to mural. Her paintings took on more of Mexico's indigenous histories and the weight of colonial conquest. She had first seen Teotihuacán as a tourist in 1951 and returned many times, to that site and others. She considered pre-Columbian art a primary influence, above all its symbolic animal iconography.
In Tlaquepaque she met the ceramic artist Jorge Wilmot, who had a workshop in nearby Tonalá. He became a mentor and a lifelong friend, introducing her to local artists and opening his large library of artist's books to her, where she first encountered Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo. Chiappone set up her own woodworking shop, carving furniture and picture frames, and the steady income gave her the independence to keep painting. Working illegally, she had to leave the country every six months and re-enter on a new visa. In San Ángel she found material in Diego Rivera's murals and in the newly opened National Museum of Anthropology.
In 1969 she left abruptly for New York City and set about re-establishing contact with her estranged family, then kept moving, between New York, New Mexico, California, Oregon, and Arizona, with many returns to Mexico. Reviewers have called the work mythological surrealism and magical realism; Chiappone's own term is mindscapes, or lyrical realism, "in so far as 'feeling' takes precedent over 'intellect.' If a painting doesn't make a sound to me, the sound of being moved, the sound of joy, then it isn't finished."
The paintings are a long investigation into mind, perception, and reality. Chiappone's dream life was an active tool for finding hidden connections between people and the natural world, a world in which boundaries are the illusion and reality is a constant flux of energy and change. She read widely, and physics, astronomy, and fractal geometry had fed her intuition that the world is kinetic. Working without preparatory drawings and without anything in front of her, she began each painting with turpentine washes brushed freely onto canvas, letting figures out of memory and the unconscious gather from what started as random density of pigment. The method is close to the one Alexander Cozens set out in his 1785 treatise, starting imaginary landscapes from random ink blots. Chiappone used it to reach an animist view of things, in which objects, plants, and animals all hold a strong life energy, and a place where spirit meets the physical plane.
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Dolores Chiappone (b. 1931, Rochester, NY; d. 2025, Arizona) painted mental vignettes that coalesce and disintegrate in filigrees of pattern and form. Her paintings are worlds in constant motion where the boundaries between people, animals, landscapes, and objects are the illusion. Referring to her work as "lyrical realism," she started her paintings without preparatory drawings, letting forms surface out of memory and the unconscious in loose turpentine washes on bare canvas, reminiscent of a process the British landscape painter Alexander Cozens set out in his 1785 treatise.
Chiappone held solo exhibitions at Tubac Center of the Arts, Tubac, AZ (2022); Carmel Art Association, Carmel, CA (2018); and Vehicle Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA (1995). Her work was represented by Ian Russell Gallery, Prescott, AZ; Samsara Gallery, Monterey, CA; Luciano Antiques, Carmel, CA; and The Connoisseur Gallery, Carmel, CA. Her art was used as cover art for the first editions of two popular books: Das Energi (1973) by Paul Williams, a hippie-spiritual classic; and Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Córdova-Rios by F. Bruce Lamb, the account of Córdova-Rios, who lived among the indigenous Huni Kui people of South America at the beginning of the 20th century. Stellarhighway will host a solo show of the artist's work in November of 2026.
︎ Inquire
“I paint things that are both symbolic and real. It’s very shamanistic, moving back and forth between dimensions. I don’t see realms as being separated. I have painted many still lifes, but I’ve never set up a still life to paint. Likewise, I don’t paint or sketch outdoors. Instead, I go outdoors, walk, observe deeply, and feel the trees. Then I come back to the studio and paint the trees.” - Dolores Chiappone
Dolores Chiappone was born in Rochester, New York in 1931, was raised in Los Angeles, and died in Arizona in 2025. As a creatively inclined child, her father taught her to restore wood furniture, and she soon began decorating the pieces she worked on with paintings. The act of making thrilled her, and from that point she knew she wanted to be an artist. Circumstances kept her out of art school, so she trained herself, reading and studying paintings in books. She drew on the range she found there: Hieronymus Bosch, pre-Columbian art, the decorative allegories of François Boucher, eighteenth century classical realists and animaliers, Rousseau's primitivism, Magritte's fantasies, and Caravaggio, for his handling of light and his attention to physical and emotional states.
By 1957 Chiappone was a young housewife and mother of two. She suffered a nervous breakdown, brought on by violence at home and compounded by postpartum depression after her second child. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Oscar Janiger, advised her to separate from her husband and her parents for her own survival. After her release, her husband took her to Mazatlán, Mexico, and left her there with the two children. Unable to care for herself or for them, she was retrieved by him a month later. On their return to the United States she was judged an unfit mother by her husband's parents and was persuaded to give the children up to them to raise.
She returned to Los Angeles in 1958 and resumed therapy with Janiger, who for several years had been running clinical studies into the therapeutic uses of LSD, including research on its effect on artists and their creative process. He included Chiappone. Subjects were given a dose and asked to draw an object in his office repeatedly. As the drug took hold the drawings grew looser and more abstract, tracking the shift in motor control and mental state. Janiger recognized how much she needed to make art and introduced her to others with the same interest. The group met at a writer's house at Big Bear Lake, outside Los Angeles, where they took LSD and sat outside under the stars. Chiappone described the sensation as "coming apart into a billion little pieces, the fragments of my being returning into a new form." She spoke about the drug in positive terms. "LSD changed who I was dramatically, and it allowed me to survive."
Her mature style dates from this period. She considered Untitled, painted in 1959 in her late twenties, the foundation of everything that followed. It shows a woman coming apart into a filigree of patterns, spirits, and phantoms, a world in motion that breaks up and recombines in unexpected ways.
Her use of LSD ended in 1960 with a session she recalled sixty years later as the most intensely beautiful and profound experience of her entire life. Even so, she thought the paintings made under its influence were poor. Colors looked supernaturally alive while she worked, and dull once the effects wore off. She stopped, and went back to Mexico, where the work fully opened up. From 1960 she moved between Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, and Tlaquepaque, the artists' community in the mountains near Guadalajara, looking for the time and space to work across mediums and at every scale from miniature to mural. Her paintings took on more of Mexico's indigenous histories and the weight of colonial conquest. She had first seen Teotihuacán as a tourist in 1951 and returned many times, to that site and others. She considered pre-Columbian art a primary influence, above all its symbolic animal iconography.
In Tlaquepaque she met the ceramic artist Jorge Wilmot, who had a workshop in nearby Tonalá. He became a mentor and a lifelong friend, introducing her to local artists and opening his large library of artist's books to her, where she first encountered Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo. Chiappone set up her own woodworking shop, carving furniture and picture frames, and the steady income gave her the independence to keep painting. Working illegally, she had to leave the country every six months and re-enter on a new visa. In San Ángel she found material in Diego Rivera's murals and in the newly opened National Museum of Anthropology.
In 1969 she left abruptly for New York City and set about re-establishing contact with her estranged family, then kept moving, between New York, New Mexico, California, Oregon, and Arizona, with many returns to Mexico. Reviewers have called the work mythological surrealism and magical realism; Chiappone's own term is mindscapes, or lyrical realism, "in so far as 'feeling' takes precedent over 'intellect.' If a painting doesn't make a sound to me, the sound of being moved, the sound of joy, then it isn't finished."
The paintings are a long investigation into mind, perception, and reality. Chiappone's dream life was an active tool for finding hidden connections between people and the natural world, a world in which boundaries are the illusion and reality is a constant flux of energy and change. She read widely, and physics, astronomy, and fractal geometry had fed her intuition that the world is kinetic. Working without preparatory drawings and without anything in front of her, she began each painting with turpentine washes brushed freely onto canvas, letting figures out of memory and the unconscious gather from what started as random density of pigment. The method is close to the one Alexander Cozens set out in his 1785 treatise, starting imaginary landscapes from random ink blots. Chiappone used it to reach an animist view of things, in which objects, plants, and animals all hold a strong life energy, and a place where spirit meets the physical plane.
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Dolores Chiappone (b. 1931, Rochester, NY; d. 2025, Arizona) painted mental vignettes that coalesce and disintegrate in filigrees of pattern and form. Her paintings are worlds in constant motion where the boundaries between people, animals, landscapes, and objects are the illusion. Referring to her work as "lyrical realism," she started her paintings without preparatory drawings, letting forms surface out of memory and the unconscious in loose turpentine washes on bare canvas, reminiscent of a process the British landscape painter Alexander Cozens set out in his 1785 treatise.
Chiappone held solo exhibitions at Tubac Center of the Arts, Tubac, AZ (2022); Carmel Art Association, Carmel, CA (2018); and Vehicle Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA (1995). Her work was represented by Ian Russell Gallery, Prescott, AZ; Samsara Gallery, Monterey, CA; Luciano Antiques, Carmel, CA; and The Connoisseur Gallery, Carmel, CA. Her art was used as cover art for the first editions of two popular books: Das Energi (1973) by Paul Williams, a hippie-spiritual classic; and Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Córdova-Rios by F. Bruce Lamb, the account of Córdova-Rios, who lived among the indigenous Huni Kui people of South America at the beginning of the 20th century. Stellarhighway will host a solo show of the artist's work in November of 2026.