Artist Wren Panzella, who painted the vibrancy of jazz, has died at 69

Apr 10, 2023

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Artist Wren Panzella pulls the canvas from an acrylic painting on glass in her Castleton home studio in 2000. She died May 8, 2023, at age 69.

"Trio," an acrylic glass-transfer painting by Wren Panzella, was on view at the now-closed Sorelle Gallery in Stuyvesant Plaza in 2015.

A Wren Panzella painting hangs in the Albany home of Bill Harris and Holly Katz, who are fans of her work.

Wren Panzella's "No Moon at All," about 4 feet wide and 2 feet high, was on view at the now-closed Sorelle Gallery in Stuyvesant Plaza in 2015.

Wren Panzella's etched transfer paintings and prints of baseball players as seen in 2007 at the The National Upholstering Design Studio/Gallery in Albany. This work, titled "Fast Ball," is a hand-colored etching.

Wren Panzella in her home studio in 2000.

Wren Panzella as seen through a glass painting in progress in her home studio in 2000.

Detail of Wren Panzella at work in her home studio in 2000.

CASTLETON — Wren Panzella rendered action and sound into paintings. Her vivid canvases, often of jazz or baseball scenes and instantly identifiable as Panzella works, graced the walls of Capital Region galleries, restaurants and friends’ homes for more than three decades, reaching to the Smithsonian in Washington, galleries in New Orleans and internationally, and the personal collection of at least one celebrity.

Panzella died suddenly May 8 at her home, according to friends. She was 69 and semi-retired after a career as an artist and collections manager at the University at Albany art museum.

Upon seeing her work for the first time, "People always said, ‘The painting is moving. It's coming off the canvas,’" said John Froebel-Parker, who ran a gallery under different names on Lark Street in Albany for more than a decade, starting in 1991, usually with at least one Panzella on the wall. At her peak in the 1990s, customers were buying scores of her paintings annually. She told the Times Union for a 2000 profile that the prior year she’d sold 52 works, priced from $100 to $2,000.

"She was a constant presence in the gallery," Froebel-Parke, who now lives in Hudson, where he curates exhibits in multiple venues, said Friday. "A painting would be there for a while, it would sell, and another would take its place. She was always popular with customers." Froebel-Parke said he and a friend, who had a relative with a gallery in France in 1997, helped arrange for Panzella to be chosen as the first official artist of the Antibes Jazz Festival on the French Riviera.

After a visit to Panzella's home studio some years ago, Times Union art critic William Jaeger was struck by what was abundantly evident about her: "Wren was a true artist. She lived it. She appreciated. Her work and her life were one," Jaeger said Friday via email.

Born Aug. 21, 1953, and raised on Long Island, she was the middle child and lone arts-minded sibling of four math and science whizzes. She dropped out of art college after a year, married Bob Panzella at age 20, worked as bookkeeper and window dresser for a clothing store in the Virgin Islands, where her husband landed a job as a teacher, and was a bookkeeper again after they relocated to the Capital Region. A lithography course at UAlbany inspired her to return to art and informed the rest of her career.

Although Panzella worked in oil painting, etching, prints and mixed media, she was best known for her glass-transfer paintings, which required the artist to work essentially in reverse from traditional painting, where the background is painted first. For a glass-transfer work, Panzella, using acrylic paint, would paint the foreground first, moving back through the layers of the scene, painting the background last. Once finished, she would apply adhesive to paper or canvas, affix it to the back of the painting on glass, let it dry for 24 hours, soak briefly in water and then peel away, lifting the paint off the glass.

"It is like turning a painting inside out," Panzella wrote in an explanation of the process on her website. She wrote, "Because ... you work from the foreground to the background, the underpainting is added last, creating new possibilities for unifying and deepening a composition."

Jon Gernon, a fellow painter who was also gallery director for many years of the now-closed Clement Frame Shop & Art Gallery in Troy, said he was awed by the process. He chose Panzella works for Clement shows for more than a decade until leaving the position in 2015.

"You could always look at the other side of the glass to see how it was coming along, but you didn't ever fully know what you had until after you removed it," Gernon said. "If it didn't all come off, weeks of work or longer would be lost."

Timothy Cahill, who reported on and reviewed visual arts for the Times Union from 1996 to 2004, first got to know Panzella from her role at the University Art Museum before he became aware of her jazz paintings.

"I underestimated them at first as simply exuberant expressions of her affable love of the music," Cahill said via email. The more closely he examined the work, the more impressed he became.

Cahill said, "She depicted the intense energy of jazz, no small feat itself, but did more. She celebrated the players and made us feel what it must be like to sit in with the band. Through her intricate use of multiple perspectives and color relationships, she gave to the eye the joy, the rich interplay and the harmonic complexity that are the soul of jazz."

Corinna Ripps Schaming, director and chief curator of the UAlbany museum, said the glass-transfer technique was suited to Panzella's temperament and skills.

"It's a very precarious way of working but one that Wren engaged with and clearly mastered," Schaming said. "For her, it opened up new ways of expressing her ideas. … She was an extremely passionate and energetic person, and in terms of her artwork, she demonstrated a passion and commitment that captured what I thought was very intuitive and energetic and improvisational way of responding to the world around her."

Tess Collins, owner of McGeary's Pub in downtown Albany, started working at the former Justin's restaurant on Lark Street in 1989, soon after the arrival of the first of what would become a collection of four Panzella jazz paintings on the walls of the dining room. Justin's owner, Joe Palma, was turning the restaurant into a destination for jazz and liked how the paintings’ energy reflected that of musicians performing live up to seven nights a week, including world-class baritone saxophonist Nick Brignola, who always returned to Justin's between national and global tours.

"She’d sit and sketch the musicians, and that would become the basis for the paintings," said Collins, who also commissioned Panzella to design T-shirts for the Justin's staff and who a few years ago received a gift of a Panzella painting from a friend.

For fans of jazz and visual art, a Panzella painting was a must-have, said Holly Katz of Albany. The home Katz shares with her partner, Bill Harris, features a Panzella painting — piano, double bass, drums, evoking the roiling feel of an all-out jam.

"Her paintings had a lot of energy and recalled her and our love of jazz," Katz said. "The viewer is drawn into the performance, and you’re back at Justin's."

One of the paintings of Brignola was purchased from a Troy gallery in 2004 by rapper-turned-country rocker Kid Rock. He paid a combined $3,100 for the Brignola painting, titled "The Flight of the Eagle," and another Panzella work depicting a saxophone trio with the piano player in the foreground, according to a Times Union story at the time.

Panzella didn't know who Kid Rock was, she told the Times Union after the purchase, adding that he "represents everything that jazz isn't. It's kind of wild that he would have liked this. He picked two extremely straight, pure-jazz pieces.’"

Collins, who remained friendly with the artist, said, "She was energized by people, art and music. That's just who she was."

Friends who have spoken to Bob Panzella said they were told there will be no wake, funeral or other services, per Wren Panzella's wishes. Details including cause of death and survivors in addition to her husband were not available Friday.