Join Legacy Village for Expansion: Marlisa Dunn Art Show on Saturday, September 17 and Sunday, September 18 from 11a.m. to 7p.m. left of Starbucks in Marlisa Dunn’s art studio. Expansion: Marlisa Dunn Art Show will feature all of the paintings completed by Marlisa during her summer residency at Legacy Village, including her live art during the Legacy Live summer concert series. For more information on Marlisa Dunn Art, please click here.

More on Expansion: Marlisa Dunn Art Show
“Someday is now.” — Sr. Corita Kent

Each day Marlisa Dunn approaches her art with optimistic swagger, as this quote lingers in the back of her mind. Marlisa started later than most artists, just two and a half years ago, and didn’t want to waste any time second-guessing herself. Marlisa approaches each painting session with sheer excitement for the learning process and a conscious refrain from self-criticism.

Fueled by emotion and longing, Marlisa’s paintings express her desire to touch, mold, retain, or even consume the subject. With a sense of urgency, she paints because she “must capture a moment in time, before it’s gone”.

Enlarging subjects allows Marlisa’s whole body to partake in the process and to feel closer to the subject. To music, she leans toward the canvas, moving back and forth as if in meditation. This releases emotion into her work. It’s a compulsion and a relief, and the reason she paints.

Marlisa Dunn’s first solo show centers around the theme of expansion. Having large studio space is just one element in creating with room to breathe, to think, to expand physically, mentally, and technically. Marlisa says, that “other elements seem sacrificial – giving up things in my life in order to paint. But it doesn’t feel like sacrifice to me.”

Legacy Village presents “Expansion: Marlisa Dunn Art Show” will include florals, figurative, still life, portraits, and live paintings. Each offering has pushed Marlisa to discover something new about herself and her process. The process includes different phases, such as scribble-sketching the subject (particularly floral or human form), watercolor studies, oil studies, writing poems or a brain dump of words and feelings. For Marlisa, it is as much about the process as it is about the end result.

This show is a view of how Marlisa expanded her mindset to invite her full artistic self to emerge. She says, “In seeing my journey from 2020 to present, I hope others feel encouraged to expand into their true selves as well.”

“Expansion: Marlisa Dunn Art Show” will include a series of paintings from Legacy Village’s Legacy Live concerts. The weather, the music, the crowd — all of this exciting energy goes directly back into Marlisa’s paintings. Painting live has pushed Marlisa to “compose and color-mix fast, while releasing control and leaning on intuition. The music fuels my work and you can see the motion in each mark.”

Capturing a show starts with a blank canvas and ends with work representing musicians playing their hearts out. It is intense painting to live music with unpredictable weather, a short timeframe, and with an audience watching; and yet it is bliss. Marlisa has cherished looking back at the brushstrokes and remembering the experience. She calls it “extreme painting” and after the show she describes herself in a “state of blissful exhaustion”.