Marisa Avelar is a graphic designer, painter, and mixed media artist born and raised in Houston, TX. She spent 4 years in the Savannah, GA area where she received her B.F.A. in Art with an emphasis in graphic design and painting from Georgia Southern University. Recently, she has relocated with her husband to Brooklyn, NY.

After beginning with traditional oil works, she ventured into mixed media pieces combining paint, found objects, fabric and her own photography. As a fine artist, her influences include the magic realism of her Latin American culture and the art of the dadaists. In her work she attempts to capture moments and memories and evoke the sense of wonder and magic in life that we often forget.

As a graphic designer, she loves the play of type and vintage advertising as well as the clean beautiful work of the modernists. She loves everything vintage and kitschy, quirky album covers, vibrant colors and anything that has personality.

Marisa has loved staying active in the Houston art scene and has volunteered a lot of her time with AIGA Houston and the Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit microcinema that showcases short films and new media. Her work has been exhibited at various local venues in Houston including, Lawndale Art Center, Hello-Lucky, Cactus Music, Fresh Arts, and My Flaming Heart.

To learn a little more here are some awesome features over the years:

SHOUTOUTHTX Interview, December 2020

Voyage Houston Interview, February 2019

Guide to Houston for Design *Sponge

Small Things In Big Numbers,"Bad Ass" Ladies Series Interview

Rice Design Alliance, Article about the first Pecha Kucha Houston, Speaker  

AIGA December 2009 Professional Spotlight

 

Artist’s Statement “In a way I still haven’t begun, they (my work) are a series of failed attempts, I am testing the grounds to find where it is possible to do something.” Alberto Giacometti From the moment I began painting everything I have done has been to experiment, trying to find a way to say things that are important to me while still making successful works of art. Each painting I have done has been a learning process. Some of them have succeeded and some of them haven’t. If I hadn’t created these images I would have never grown as an artist. The more I work and experiment the more I grow. It is only by doing that I have learned how to make an interesting painting. No other medium I have worked with has been as rewarding and challenging to me. As I have learned more, I realize that painting is a lot like life. Essentially we are always beginning in everything, everyday is a struggle to reach for something better. You are either going to be someone who lets difficulty defeat you or you are going to be someone who has a greater vision of success and will continue knowing there is better and you can reach it one day. Through that process you do get better. There is a poem in Spanish by Eduardo Galeano that says: Ella está en el horizonte. Me acerco dos pasos, ella se aleja dos pasos. Camino diez pasos y el horizonte se corre diez pasos más allá. Por mucho que camine nunca la alcanzaré. ¿Para qué sirve la utopía? Para eso sirve: Para caminar. She is on the horizon. If I walk closer two steps, the horizon goes two steps further. I walk ten steps and the horizon always goes ten steps further. No matter how much I walk I can never reach it. What is the Utopia for? That’s what it is for, to walk. Giacometti says that he still hadn’t begun but through that process of wanting more and never reaching it he became better. As I have struggled creating painting after painting to make them work I have produced an interesting body of images. Had I been timid, not wanting to play with and change what I painted, thinking only of success or failure I would not have learned and I wouldn’t have grown. I had to have faith in myself that no matter how far out I went I was learning by doing and I could make it work. The minute you put something on the canvas you may have an idea of how you want it to look, but almost always it doesn’t turn out that way, it becomes its own image separate from you. Your job is to make that image work. It takes a lot of letting go of your ego; submitting your ego to the picture. When the viewer comes to see my art they view it as finished. It doesn’t matter what my ideas were, in the end either its going to be interesting and successful for them or its not. Ambiguity is very important to me. I hope I give the viewer enough room to invest themselves personally into my work. It is not always important that my own idea is fully understood. Art communicates things that I sense and feel visually, and reveal emotions that I can’t put into words. They are visual poems. When viewing my work I want the audience to walk away being affected by it. The art that is most interesting to me is by artists who have the power to offend or anger people, not just for the sake of cheap provocation but because it reminds people of what they feel strongly about in life. Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Kara Walker, Robert Mapplethorpe and Henri Matisse have all inspired my work, but the one artist who has inspired me the most is Frida Kahlo. I sense a kindred spirit in her. We seem to look at life very much the same way. She puts what she sees on the canvas with unbridled honesty and passion. In painting I have learned so much, it is probably the toughest medium I have worked with but also the most rewarding, all because you are constantly solving problems. Lately my works have involved mixed media. I love to collect fabrics and found objects and incorporate them into my paintings. I have found that objects from everyday life make great statements about the world that we live in, for the simple reason that they come from it. Life is random and yet random things come together to produce a powerful whole. Often these objects are forgotten or discarded but I see a history in each object and I use them to express my emotions or to talk about issues that affect us today. I am fascinated by color and texture and paintings are a beautiful way of combining everything that I love. Many of my works are about capturing a memory or feeling or my philosophies on life or politics. Mainly though, I try to make people realize that there is a lot of beauty and magic in the world and as we grow older we forget about being in awe of it. I want to bring that sense of wonderment back. I am fascinated with my identity, my roots and culture. By producing art and embarking on this exploration I have discovered personal issues that have helped me to better understand myself. Of all of the things I could have done I chose art. What I saw in art is that there are no rules. Art is always breaking down barriers. When I study art I see constant progress and freedom. Never have I seen in any other aspect of life the freedom there is in art. It can be done in any way and with any medium. Throughout the centuries art seems to become less controlled by outside forces and more controlled by the spirit and imagination of the individual. The artist tries to find different ways to communicate and learns different mediums in which to do this. As an artist I am learning different ways to say what I want to say and to make new forms of art. For me it is what makes creating art always exciting, and in a way I still haven’t begun.