
WHO GIVES? | 2024
Gabriella Musetti
Acrylic on Canvas, 60x90cm
The Title of this piece is ‘Who Gives?’ I was fascinated by the research in the early 2000s into blue zones, a concept that identified locations where people live longer and healthier lives than average.
Research into Mappa Mundi led me to appreciate that these maps were intended to be schematic and demonstrate a principle rather than for naviga?onal use. With this interpretation I wanted to visualizes schematically the equivalent of blue zones for generosity as this kindness has a clear link to health alongside its external positive multiplier effect.
Data from CAF’s World Giving Index iden?fied highest ranked ‘givers’ based on 3 giving
behaviors; helping strangers, donating money and volunteering time. Interestingly the
outcomes suggest an even mix of nations in the top rankings that are suffering through conflict, environmental trauma or political strife as those prosperous and peaceful na?ons.
I have blended the repetitive strokes, layers and movement that I use in my painting and the
tones follow a theme of recent paintings inspired by the natural world but on a more micro
scale. This has been overlaid with an ombre tone for the ‘giving hotspots’.
GABRIELLA MUSETTI
Gabriella is an Artist and Coach living in Abu Dhabi with her family. Coming from the corporate world, she always practiced art as a passion with pain?ng as her key interest alongside collecting art. She is now an Executive and Creativity Coach working with corporate and creative leaders. She has a particular interest in working with visual artists and also coaches probono for a British charity supporting military veterans.
Gabriella has worked with mixed media and sculpture but has kept returning to painting as her favorite medium and uses repetitive pattern, movement and colour to form her pieces. She finds painting to be a form of natural thought processing and unpacking of the subconscious,
with the patterns unfurling as if releasing excess thought and informa?on from the mind to
help clarify it. In this way she finds her art and coaching practices symbiotic.
She is heavily inspired by abstract expressionists including Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Hussein Sharif, Gillian Ayres and Rashid Johnson.