Arts & Business Insights: Liv Cappello

Liv Cappello is an oil painter who has received multiple grants from the Somerville Arts Council and has exhibited at Logan Airport, Aeronaut Brewery, and elsewhere. She’s also the developer of the online resource Gesso, a studio management and website-building tool. As part of our series on Creative Entrepreneurialism, we asked her about her creative practice, the online tool she created, and the throughline between painting and web development.

Talk about your painting practice. What are the questions or processes that drive your creative work?
My recent work focuses on everyday interiors — domestic spaces, the objects in them, and especially the light moving through them. I’m interested in the rooms we sometimes forget about: a bathroom sink, a doorway, the threshold between inside and outside. The question behind most of my recent work is something like “what does it look like to actually notice your own home?”

I started oil painting after years of silkscreen printing and linocut carving. I stumbled into watching oil painters online and started picking up books on painting techniques. Since then I’ve been obsessed, and have been lucky to take workshops with artists I admire, like Zoey Frank, Caitlin Winner, and Christina Kent.

What’s the direction of your current paintings?
Right now I’m working on two separate bodies of work: a series of small-format panels about summer light at home, and a bathroom sink series. I’m also trying to get outside more and embrace plein air painting!

Congratulations on your grants from the Somerville Arts Council! What has been your experience being an artist in Somerville?
Somerville is where I felt like an artist for the first time. I rented my first art studio here, and having that space really propelled me into pursuing art more seriously. I’ve really embraced what it means to be a part of the artist community here, and am so grateful for the connections I’ve made in my studio building, local shops and galleries, and at art fairs and markets across MA. It’s also been wonderful to have such a supportive and collaborative community when building Gesso – the Somerville community was pivotal in building the platform.

What other forms of support have been most impactful to you, as an artist?
Workshops with working painters (both online and in-person) have been the most impactful for me. Beyond that, other artists’ generosity has been a huge form of support during my time here. Studio neighbors, people I’ve taught with, and artists who answered questions honestly about pricing and galleries and the difficult parts of running an art practice.

Along with being a painter, you work as a web developer. Are there skills that serve you in both fields? Are there ways that being a web developer impacts your painting, or vice versa?
Painting and web development are more alike than they seem. Both are iterative – you start with the big shapes and concepts, step back, adjust, and refine. Both reward starting over. Development and design work helped train my eye for composition before I started painting, and painting has made me a better developer: it has taught me patience, and what it actually feels like to be the user I’m building the platform for. When I’m building Gesso, I’m really building for the artist side of myself.

Where did Gesso start for you? What has been the trajectory of the resource since that initial idea?
It started as my own mess: a website I couldn’t afford to keep up, an inventory spreadsheet I never updated, sales records buried in email, commissions on post-it notes. The administrative work was pulling me away from painting, and every tool I tried was built for someone other than a working artist. So I built the thing I wanted — one place for a portfolio site, inventory, sales, contacts, and all the other pieces that encompass running an art business.

The artists around me built it with me. Most of what’s in Gesso is there because a studio neighbor or a workshop friend asked for it. It launched in May 2026, there are now over 100 artists on it, and it’s grown into partnerships with artist communities here and abroad.

Were there any “surprise twists” in the development of Gesso?
The biggest surprise was how fast it stopped being local. I built it with feedback from Somerville artists, and within two months of launch there were artists in the UK and Germany using it — apparently the spreadsheet problem is universal. The other surprise was how much of building software for artists is just listening to artists talk about their practice, their pain points, and commiserating with them about the fact that being an artist is also running a business.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists or artists hoping to take the next step in their career?
Treat the business side as part of the practice. Knowing what you’ve made, what it costs, what sold, and who bought it isn’t corporate — it’s how you protect the time and money to keep painting. Keep the business side simple, and start it sooner than feels necessary.

And apply for as many things as you can, but know that rejection is a huge part of being an artist.

What’s next for you?
Definitely more painting! I’m lucky to be going on a plein air retreat in Maine this September with one of my favorite artists. And I’m so excited to be growing Gesso alongside my art practice, so I’ll keep listening to artists and building around their needs.

Liv Cappello (b. 1998) is a Somerville-based oil painter whose work has been exhibited throughout New England, including with the Cambridge Art Association, the Nave Gallery, and the New Hampshire Art Association. Her art is on display in the newly-opened JetBlue Lounge at Logan Airport. She is a recipient of a 2026 Visual Arts Fellowship and a 2025 Visual Arts Project Grant from the Somerville Arts Council.