Antonella Trapasso:
Thula’s Artistic Path

This article was originally published on Hue & Eye.

About Antonella Maria Trapasso

Thula, or Antonella Maria Trapasso (b.1965), originally from Rome, is an artist that today lives and works in Milan. Her path has always been based upon research and discovery, as Antonella was doing something else in her first working career before finding out she was an artist. As a matter of fact, she accomplished a degree in Literature and classical studies. These fields, she will then declare, have been quite formative to her artistic research as for the development of aesthetic expertise and heritage. But something else Antonella often states is how she has been feeling overwhelmed by an emotion of dissatisfaction for her (past) life and attraction towards art. Antonella was a creative kid with an artistic personality: dreamy, visionary, and attracted to innovative ways of conceiving her emotional world. Throughout her younger years, she felt as if she had to silence her passion to commit to her outlined future. The frustration she was feeling had indeed grown as years went by, to finally explode in the mid-nineties, and while she was busy with her regular job, she applied to some art classes to further explore her interest in painting and drawing. Here Antonella learned several artistic techniques that led her to leave her conventional life to commit herself to art finally.

About Thula

Nowadays Antonella signs her artworks as Thula, a stage name with several meanings. Mainly, as she tells us, Thula was a simple childhood nickname to which she always felt attached. Later she discovered also to be the name of a legendary isle, a secret place holding some historical facts. All this just well matched her personality and path, as it combined some mystic element to her formal roots. Antonella is a woman with a versatile personality, a careful explorer with an experimental approach. We could confirm a duality in her temper. Antonella and Thula are a perfect combination of a double-sided nature to better take care of every detail of life, as the irrational and rational ones.

About Her Artworks

Her artworks have always been characterized by an innovative eye, especially towards the chosen materials and techniques. Art is for Thula a tool to experiment and test what she gains from the outside world. Thula is indeed interested in every small change regarding contemporary trends and uses art as a method to reinterpret her vision about the present and future approach to life. She focuses upon textures and gestures, an art form that is not common nowadays. Thula is intuitive and bold, and as she has been working in the art field for a while, she now knows what she wants to communicate. Her canvases are small sculptures, an attempt to show how an experimental approach leads to something unique. As she tells us that everything is born from a tiny cell, she has a particular eye towards what art could be able to generate. One of her main body of works, for instance, was made from sustainable paint that purifies the air, and this was happening well before the recent global urge. Thula is a foreseen on what is about to come in the world of technological innovations in art. Another attempt is the use of led lights she used in her paintings before the boom in the nineties or the use of a specific paint that served as an electricity conductor. Once, Thula tells us, she accidentally left a canvas made of resin to dry outside her home to then realize it began raining. Instead of throwing the result away, she used that technique of combining water with resin many other times ahead. Thula sees art and life as excellent tools to understand and explore furthermore about emotions and opportunities. Her artworks are starting to get recognized, although this doesn’t matter to her, as her aim is to contribute to making art a meaningful tool for many other artists to come.

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