Explore Steamboat, Designer and painter Marissa Mack makes art for herself, when inspiration strikes

Designer and painter Marissa Mack makes art for herself, when inspiration strikes

Friday, August 29, 2008

Photo by John F. Russell. Enlarge photo.

Painter Marissa Mack’s work is on display at the Creekside Café & Grill in downtown Steamboat Springs. Mack was raised in Steamboat Springs and also works as an interior decorator when she isn’t painting. Below: Mack’s paintings will be on display at Creekside Café & Grill through the end of the month. Creekside is open daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Call 879-4925.

By Margaret Hair (Contact)

Photo by John F. Russell

Mack’s paintings will be on display at Creekside Café & Grill through the end of the month. Creekside is open daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Call 879-4925.

Photo by John F. Russell

Marissa Mack's painting titled "Geometric Planes" is currently on display at the Creekside Cafe & Grill in downtown Steamboat Springs along with several other pieces.

Photo by Matt Stensland

Marissa Mack’s work is currently on display at the Creekside Café & Grill in downtown Steamboat Springs. Mack was raised in Steamboat Springs and also works as an interior decorator. Photo by John F. Russell

Marissa Mack is the first to point out she’s not a professional painter.

But then, Mack is fairly modest about her art, which for the month of August has lined the walls at Creekside Café & Grill.

On a Friday morning, friends from across town greet Mack, a Steamboat Springs native, with lighthearted offers on her abstract canvasses and demands for personalized paintings to put in their homes.

“It’s so cool to have people who don’t know me want to buy my art,” she said, nervous, smiling and caffeinated as she surveys the walls for pieces that have bids on them and scans the restaurant for customers looking at her work.

“It is nerve-racking to put yourself out there. I worried about being in here for breakfast and having people critique my art and not realize that I’m at the next table,” said Mack, a Creekside regular.

Although she’s a bit skittish about her paintings, Mack has been an assistant interior designer with Finial Designs for the past three years and has four years of Hollywood set design experience. And although she’s conscious about her work, Mack doesn’t have trouble taking the steps to make it — in 2001, she dropped out of California’s Westmont College after three semesters to go into art direction for a production company.

“I felt like I had really found my niche,” she said of “the whole Hollywood thing.”

“It’s a bit like what I do now in interior design. You get to design a space around a character. For me, it had that element of creating a story around a character who is not like you at all and then using this artistic ability,” she said, explaining that she’ll always remember Shane Gilbert, the high school English teacher who first encouraged that artistic ability.

“She painted a little, and she sectioned off part of the English room so that I could have my own space,” Mack said. Gilbert also recruited her to help paint some murals and took her to Denver to buy her first set of art supplies.

“To have someone invest in you — especially in a small town, sometimes you can’t see outside the now. And to have someone invest in you helps you feel that,” she said.

Mack has the tendency to take on several projects at once. She wants to try designing her own clothes next. She spent about a year on the pieces for the show at Creekside. She describes that artwork as “colorful, abstract and unusual,” with distinct lines and shapes set atop a paint-washed background. She also tends to repaint her paintings.

“It’s hard to paint something and then you have it in your house and you stare at it, and then you’ll be in the moment and have something you’re inspired by, and you have no blank canvasses around, so you have to take down the one you like the least and paint over it,” she said.