Stephen Spagnoli

New York City

“Art has always been my refuge. I began it as therapy, and it became a narrative, it became a story. I wanted to convey the experience as much as possible, but I didn’t want to scare people away. The content of my work is ‘infused’ with ideas from my living with physical and emotional disability to create an abstract style that hides the pain in aesthetically pleasing images.”

Stephen Spagnoli (he/him/his) is a self-taught fine artist as well as a published illustrator, musician, songwriter, teacher, husband, and father. Spagnoli’s paintings are often autobiographical. For many years, he painted to visualize and cope with chronic pain of RSD, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome. He used art as an aspect of his therapy but also to spread awareness around the debilitating pain caused by RSD, a relatively unknown disease causing acute pain, swelling, tremors and muscle spasms that can develop from a physical injury.

Spagnoli currently describes his process as working from an intuitive and process-oriented perspective in search of “happy mistakes.” He views himself as an “outsider artist working across multiple disciplines” and is currently an artist in residence at The Living Museum in Queens, New York.