Lffa lisa Freedman Fine Arts

This Season LFFA is proud to present the story and works of Layla Fanucci, an internationally acclaimed painter based in St. Helena, California. Fanucci has developed her own signature style of art inspired by the beautiful cities she’s traveled to throughout the world. Indeed this artist’s life story embodies her own passionate and successful approach to her work. Layla hopes her story and art inspires others to find their own unique path in life.

 LAYLA FANUCCI

Layla Fanucci started her creative life out as a musician, playing piano and guitar. A young Layla put herself through school at San Francisco State University teaching music while pursuing a degree in sociology.

When she married Robert Fanucci and settled into a new home in the Napa Valley in the late 1990's, Layla found herself searching for a 'big, live work of art' to grace their new home. Finding nothing to her liking, she purchased some art supplies instead and created a magnificent, colorful abstract painting she could not otherwise find on the market.

A Star is Born

Layla's first painting opened the floodgates to an exciting new career and to the hundreds of paintings that followed in the ensuing years, as well as to the development of her own unique painting technique that has since become her 'signature' . By 2001, Layla was able to stop teaching music and devote herself to making art full-time. She followed her first painting with a version of Matisse's The Red Studio, as well as two other works inspired by Matisse. Then she began creating portraits of her family, still lifes, city scenes and figural abstractions.

Layla’s early paintings signaled a style of paintings that were diverse in character, maintaining vibrant color, bold forms, energetic brush strokes and a sense that whatever the style or subject matter, the painting was charged with underlying emotion. She carries this style through to her work today on canvases that equally evoke a real pleasure in the act of creating, and she has said that "every time I paint I get the same feeling of electricity, satisfaction, and completion" that she had first experienced in creating music. Besides Matisse, Fanucci cites the work of Picasso and Cezanne, her architect father and her extensive travels as being early influences in her work.

 A Style is Created

In 2005, Layla’s travels emerged as an on-going series of paintings, each inspired by a specific city. These dense images realized in black brush strokes on colored grounds, capture both a sense of place and the wonder and intensity of urban life in cities across the world: San Francisco, New York, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Barcelona and beyond. Each painting, whether it be San Francisco today, NYC in the 1920's or a small town in Italy, are icons of urban wonder seen through the lens of the 'wish-I-was-there' desire of the painter in her studio. All of Fanucci's cityscapes are edited in a manner which captures the iconic element that identifies the site's energy and 'magic'.

 Layla works out of a charming, 120-year old farmhouse in the Napa Valley that not only serves as both her studio and gallery, but as home to her family’s winemaking business. In the basement of her studio, Layla’s husband Rob Fanucci lovingly and painstaking incorporates many of the same old-world wine-making techniques and tools that his grandfather taught him on this same property when Rob was a child, setting Charter Oak Winery apart from the other 500 Napa Valley Wineries as one of the 'most original and old-world wineries in Napa Valley'. The Fanucci’s son, David, is fast becoming the third generation of skilled winemakers in this family. A visit to their website www.charteroakwine.com/ tells this story.

Those fortunate enough to plan a trip to St Helena may well enjoy meeting the Fanucci's, touring the winery, tasting samples and touring Layla's art studio. Their life and their work is a celebration of art, wine, music, family and food.

The Fanucci Family Story has been told throughout media outlets on a global level as well. It is the story of a family that has found success and happiness by supporting each others individual passions and talents to their own great delight, success and happiness and those fortunate enough to be a part of their ever-expanding world.