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Interdisciplinary artist and Marina del Rey resident Marischa Slusarski at her El Segundo studio.
Artist Marischa Slusarski forged an extraordinary path to achieve her dream By Bridgette M. Redman Pasadena Weekly Contributing Writer
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hen one is called to be an artist, it doesn’t matter what hurdles have to be jumped over or what prejudices have to be overcome. An artist finds the way to create what they are meant to create and become the artist they are meant to be. Marina del Rey resident Marischa Slusarski knew from the time she was a young child that she wanted to be an artist. It didn’t matter that she came from a family of second-generation immigrants and was raised by strict, religious parents in a small suburb of Denver with no access to museums or other forms of art. “I was really voraciously curious
about art, drawing and painting at an early age, but I didn’t have a foundation to support or nurture that curiosity,” Slusarski said. “My parents didn’t understand, and we had no access to contemporary art or fine art galleries or museums. They wanted me to paint pictures of the Rocky Mountains and landscapes.” Instead, Slusarski drew half-human, half-rabbit creatures; biomorphic figures; and things that made her parents think she was insane. When she went off to a small state college, she wasn’t allowed to be an art major, because she had to get a job. However, in between her journalism classes, she haunted the arts depart-
ment, creating as often as she could. Some evenings she’d spend in printmaking shops. “I had to chart my own course,” Slusarski said. “I was my own north star.” Once she left college, Slusarski got a series of what she called “gold-bricking jobs” to support her painting. She would take jobs with no supervision, where no one knew what she was doing. “I would paint all night and then go to my office and fall asleep on the floor,” Slusarski said. “I was sticking it to the man for the right to be an artist. I was so determined to be a full-time artist.” Along the way she would do things
Commissions launched next artistic phase Soon, things started taking off for Slusarski’s art career. She caught the attention of people in the movie industry, who bought her art. She was picked up by a gallery and a friend started acting as her European art consultant. “I was doing the hybrid work,” Slusarski said. “They were representational animal portraits that were half-human and half-animal. They were amalgamations, deformed and conjoined.” She was able to quit her gold-bricking jobs as commissions started to roll in. “There were a lot of TV actors and famous people who wanted me to paint their special family dynamic as animals,” Slusarski said. “A kid would want to be a parrot or a mountain lion. One TV actor wanted me to paint him as a half-tiger. I painted him as a tigerfish — that was really weird.” Sometimes her clients got oddly specific. One woman commissioned Slusarski to paint her husband as a Chippendale beefcake with a wolf head, sitting in front of a lake while reading a book and catching a fly at the same time. “Those commissions were really hard,” Slusarski said. Life as a full-time artist came with adventures as well. Slusarski traveled the world looking for places to create. She described how she once got on a plane to Bangkok with no money. She had a friend there who had a great gallery, and he was dubbed by
Submitted photo
like work as a body painter in a Hollywood nightclub. She’d paint the women who danced on the lit cubes as well as the nightclub customers. She’d make turkey dogs out of a rice cooker and steamer and sell them for $5 a piece to supplement her tips. Her first real show was at the food court in the Santa Monica mall. “That was really weird,” Slusarski said. “My painting could be construed as somewhat disturbing. You’d be sitting there with your entire family, eating a hot dog on a stick and looking at these weird paintings.” A person who was influential in the art world — and who later became a major champion of her work — approached Slusarski, and the first thing she asked was whether she’d been abused as a child.
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