Cover Artist, Paula Gasparini-Santos By Marcos Perez
T
he two paths of art and therapy converge in the heart of Paula Gasparini-Santos. She has cultivated her passion for helping others navigate trauma and creates artwork that is as beautiful as it is deeply personal, revealing universal truths about being human. Over her life, these two themes have been woven together as she fosters a life that she loves, bringing her entire self fully to her work. Paula is a Brazilian-born artist living in Boulder, Colorado, and a graduate of Naropa’s MA in Transpersonal Art Therapy. Early on, Paula had a deep interest in understanding what it meant to be human and looking at the intrinsic truths behind the human experience through theology. “I have a trauma background in my family histor y,” she says, “so I knew that I wanted to go into psychology.” She went on to get her bachelor’s degree in psychology while she also discovered a love for painting. As a university student, she explored her love of color through ceramic classes. Her professor saw the painter in her, and together, they invented a painting class around her interest in psychology and art. The syllabus would look very much like an art therapy class. After graduation, she was looking for a small community where she could make a difference. She moved to Hana, Hawaii, to help bring the arts back to the public school system. In order to fund her arts program, she started showing her paintings and selling them. She was surprised at how much people loved her work. She went on to do a solo exhibition in Miami where she sold every piece.
Photos by Anna Fischer
She liked that people were excited about her work, but she most loved that they were connecting to the story that she was telling about her own life. “The heart is a reoccurring symbol [in my work], because I do believe the element of healing is vulnerability,” Paula says. “You have to expose that heart, you have to expose everything that is within for us to be able to do the work of healing.” While later working as a clinician at a family trauma center dealing with mental health and sobriety, Paula helped children do their work of recovery from family traumas, such as methamphetamine addiction. After a year, she was struggling with vicarious trauma from listening to the children’s stories. She knew that she needed to learn how to better sit with her own emotions while doing her job. Her supervisor
Naropa Magazine | 2021–22 | magazine.naropa.edu
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