Wk4 – Artist Conversation – Marissa Espiritu

Artist: Marissa Espiritu
Exhibition: The Chase
Media: Mixed-Media, Digital Animation, Comic Book, Digital Illustration
Gallery: LBSU School of Art, Dr. Maxine Merlino Gallery
Website: https://miespiritu.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mie_doods/

Marissa Espiritu is an undergraduate student at the California State University of Long Beach. She is in her fourth year and her last semester at Long Beach. She is working toward finishing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the School of Art’s Illustration program. Espiritu is a member of the 22 West Magazine illustration team on campus. She enjoys creating comics, graphics, and is also interested in animation production. She loves to wear hats and draw in her free time. Espiritu hopes to find herself producing animation and in the meantime she will continue doing what she loves. 

Espiritu had many forms to her artwork as she had created multiple pieces. She used a warm and smokey color palette for all of her pieces. It was a mixture of colors from a sunset and black. Many colors were overlapping and blended between one another. She had enlarged pieces of her comic book to put on display. The comic book itself was a bit larger than any ordinary comic book. All of her work was done by digital illustration. There was a recurring theme of darkness throughout all of her work. Each page included many overlapped shapes that included different images in each one. The shapes consisted of rectangles, squares and many other unconventional shapes. There were no perfectly straight lines, only jagged ones. Any lines she used to create an outline around something was much thicker than the others. Each character Espiritu had digitally drawn had a cartoonish and rough look to them.

Espiritu decided to do a group exhibition with a friend who was doing something very similar in style and context. They both had a vigilante story for their work. Espiritu’s comic illustration story was called The Chase. It is about a girl who grew up a vigilante with her vigilante uncle. She is going through a mental dilemma of what constitutes as good and what constitutes as bad. She needs to figure out how to safely get herself out of that situation. Espiritu also explained that the character is on a journey of trying to find herself as a person. The themes challenged in her art were: loyalty, familial obligation, and morality. Espiritu wanted to show how society modifies their morality when it comes to family.

Espiritu did an amazing job conveying her message, and have beautiful artwork. I really related with the theme of familial obligation and morality that she conveyed through her art. I sometimes find myself making life choices based off of my family’s opinions rather than listening to my gut. I want to please them because of the amazing things they have done for me and the sacrifices they have made for me, but I know I need to make my own choices in life for what I want. This experience helped me realise that it’s ok to make your own decisions and mistakes as that is the only way I will learn to grow as an individual.