I’m Marissa Lazaridis, an artist and storyteller raised in Queens, New York. My instinct to create began early, sitting beside my father as he sketched blueprints for his construction work. I copied his lines, and that quiet imitation became my first act of self-recognition. My parents saw something in it and enrolled me in a neighborhood art studio, a small basement space that became my refuge.

​

There, I learned discipline before freedom: how to observe, render, and refine. Years later, I’ve returned to that early impulse, but now I create from intuition rather than structure.

​

My early work reflected order, precision, and design. So naturally, I studied architecture and translated my love of form into something practical. But now, freedom is my medium. I follow what demands a response from my body.

​

I am a visual artist whose practice centers around oil painting but expands into drawing, mixed media, and written reflection. My process is slow, intentional, and ritualistic. Each piece takes months and lives with me before it's ready to be seen. Some works will find new homes; others may never leave mine. But all of them begin as presence and become a kind of memory.

​

My work emerges from silence, memory, and deep sacral response. I create when something in the real world pulls me out of my body and asks to be witnessed. Whether it’s a view from a window or a village celebration (coming soon), these images become sacred not because they last, but because they don’t.

​

My paintings are elegies in oil. They hold the joy, the movement, the intimacy of life, but they are always, quietly, about its impermanence.

​

I create for those who move slowly, love deeply, and feel the weight of impermanence in beauty. My work is a devotion to presence, timing, and the unseen. I paint when the world hushes, when time feels suspended and everything goes still. In those moments, something bitter and knowing stirs in me, the reminder that nothing lasts, that we’re all moving toward the same fate.

​

Whether architectural or ancestral, every piece is my way of holding that moment, a record of what I’ve felt but couldn’t always say.





















​

“It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby