There’s a point in my conversation with Marisa DeLuca in which she describes her art, especially lately, as a grieving process.
“I’m starting to get to the acceptance part, but it’s also starting to feel really ghosty,” DeLuca remarks. “I’m kind of in a state of mourning when it comes to Oceanside, and I’m going through these phases. The spirit of place is barely there anymore and the only thing I have left to hold onto is the idea of it. The recorded memory of these places.”
These recorded memories are at the conceptual heart of DeLuca’s brilliant and meticulously detailed oil and mixed-media paintings. Even to the untrained eye, they are intricate depictions of everyday life, almost urban plein air paintings, and they are most often of places and things one might encounter in everyday life: street lamps, a door, a series of post office boxes.
Spend a little more time with these pieces, however, and the viewer might get the distinct sense that there is, in fact, some sort of haunting within the sinuous shadowing and diligent brushwork. These works are, indeed, tributary in nature, a yearnful embalming of place and a memorial to her hometown of Oceanside as she has watched it transform and gentrify over the years from a working-class city to yet another tourist-friendly coastal destination.
It’s not surprising to learn that DeLuca has come to call this series of works “Spectre,” some of which will be on display at “What Goes Up Must Come Down,” a solo show of her work opening November 9 at the Hill Street Country Club gallery space in Oceanside.
“One of the hard things about showing the work in Oceanside, and also one of the greatest things, is that people recognize the spaces instantly,” says DeLuca, who will also have some of her work up at “Emerging,” a group show at SDSU’s Everett Gee Jackson Gallery through October 24.
“If I showed it in San Diego or anywhere else someone might think it resembles a church they used to go to or something like that. But if I show it in Oceanside, people recognize it. It feels so good to use this work for a specific, intended purpose of connecting to my fellow O’Sider, and to mourn and celebrate together.”
She points to a charcoal drawing on the wall of her studio at San Diego State University where she is a full-time MFA candidate and part-time teaching assistant. In devastating black-and-white, the piece depicts the fire that erupted on the Oceanside Pier earlier this year, complete with the billowing plumes of smoke that could be seen for miles. She remarks that the piece was something of a turning point in her grieving process. Something akin to the acceptance phase.
“When the fire happened it was symbolic to me in the sense that it made me think this place is burning down,” says DeLuca, who rendered the piece using dutifully collected, dried and preserved charcoal leftover from the pier fire. “That’s it. It’s over.”
While DeLuca’s words might sound fatalistic in print, it’s important to point out that her work originated from a tender place. Much of her current work began just before she started her graduate studies and in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When COVID hit, I was home with my kids and we just began this routine of walking the neighborhood,” reflects DeLuca, who is a single mother of three children. “I started to meditate on my neighborhood, the roots and the community that were there, and just fell in love.”
It started as something of a “love letter” to her hometown, with DeLuca in the garage painting things she encountered along these walks — flowers growing in people’s yards and the chickens that ran around the neighborhood.
“My work is representational, but there’s something about the common places that, for me, can be such a spiritual experience when we slow down to look at it,” DeLuca says.
She says the series took a turn when she began to notice drastic changes to the city post-pandemic. She recounts noticing how developers had taken advantage of the financial downturn, erecting buildings and flipping apartment buildings where generations of people had once lived.
“The building is gone and the space is transformed and the photos that I took of these spaces are not ever going to be seen by the public, and so what remains is just the painting that I make,” DeLuca says. “So it became more of this idea of preserving what is being lost, and recording it in paint with such accuracy. The details, the atmosphere, the everything, I just wanted to save it as it was.”
“I started to get this sense of urgency from looking at these places, these treasured landmarks that aren’t really anything,” she continues. “It’s just that one house on the corner that you always see, but I have so many memories in these places. But it occurred to me that it isn’t just my memories recorded in these spaces. So this urgency came over me that I have to start preserving these spaces.”
This appreciation for the historical and desire to preserve and memorialize started early for DeLuca. A lifelong local who “bounced around” all over San Diego County before settling in Oceanside in 2002, she says some of her fondest memories were visiting historical places with her father or on school field trips.
“I would walk around historical places and think about all the other people, all the other feet that had walked there,” recalls DeLuca, adding that she often felt like a “weirdo” for having these strange thoughts about the past. “I’d think about all their stories. I could always feel something like these recorded memories in these old spaces.”
Already a single mother of two daughters by the time she was 30, DeLuca says she was something of a “hobbyist” when it came to painting until she eventually made the intimidating decision to go back to school to study art and hasn’t looked back since.
Inspired by Realist painters such as Gustave Courbet and Andrew Wyeth as much as by by social revolutionary organizations such as the Situationist International movement in 1960’s Europe, it’s convenient to see DeLuca’s work as a beautiful, albeit blatant statement on the pervasive effects of late-stage capitalism on working-class people and neighborhoods. And while these paintings are specific to her experience, as well as to a time and place in the history of her city, the thematic elements of memory, geography and gentrification will be relatable to anyone who loves their neighborhood, but who is slowly being priced out.
So, yes, one could describe her work as Remodernism, with it’s hyperrealist specificities and expressive scenes, but it could just as easily be described as Psychogeographical, to borrow the Situationist term for the exploration and connectedness we feel to places and paths within our urban areas.
“It’s this idea of taking a dérive,” says DeLuca, borrowing a term from Situationist Guy Debord. “It’s about developing your own map, and really settling down into a space to really feel it. Connecting to the common place in terms of class.”
At this point, DeLuca clearly becomes emotional if not entirely refocused on her own neighborhood.
“Oceanside was one of the last working class places on the coast of San Diego and it’s heartbreaking for me to see those indicators of hard work plastered over and homogenized in different shades of black, white and gray.”
With this, she pauses, as if gazing inward to recover the memories of places that are now gone.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s been a lot.”
BIO BOX
Name: Marisa DeLuca
Born: San Diego, California
Age: 40
Fun fact: In addition to her art, DeLuca also serves as a member of the Oceanside Arts Commission and founded the nonprofit Artists in Solidarity in 2020. The collective raises funds every year for migrant families via online charity art auctions.
Marisa DeLuca: ‘What Goes Up Must Come Down’
When: Opens Nov. 9 and runs through Jan. 12
Where: Hill Street Country Club, 530 S. Coast Hwy, Oceanside
Admission: Free
Phone: (760) 917-6666
Online: thehillstreetcountryclub.org
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