MARLESSA ANN WESOLOWSKI
Artist
welcome
My work is rooted in exploration, process, and connection - to people, place, culture, and the natural world. Over the past twenty-five years, I've worked across painting, film, textile, and collaborative forms, following how each medium opens new ways of seeing and understanding the world's complexities.
Working primarily in oil and acrylic paint on linen and canvas, I use abstract and stylized imagery to explore through colour, gesture, and symbolic form how we inhabit, alter, and belong to the living world. My practice moves between the poetic and the political, bearing witness to beauty and tension, loss and renewal.
Alongside my studio work, I've spent over two decades as artist-in-residence at St. Paul's Hospital, where I co-founded the Healing Arts Program. This work has deepened my belief that arts, culture, nature, and care are inseparable.
My current body of work creates visual allegories exploring how we might rewild not only our landscapes but our collective imagination. I'm drawn to moments where human presence and wild resilience meet - where nature finds unexpected ways to adapt. Each painting invites you to notice what often goes unspoken in our relationship with the environment.
The work shown here spans from 2005 to 2025, representing a selection from my practice. Many works are not shown.I'm currently updating this website to include an online shop for prints, original works, and other offerings. Soon you will be able to sign up for my newsletter to be notified when new work becomes available and to receive studio updates.
I'm honoured to share this creative journey with you, and I hope it resonates with something in your own experience.
Inherited Landscapes:
Allegories of Adaptation
These paintings explore how economic and cultural systems drive ecological collapse, forcing wildlife to adapt to our infrastructure-dominated world. Through stylized allegory, I examine rewilding as both ecological restoration and a reimagining of how we belong with the Earth.
about
Marlessa Ann Wesolowski (b.1971)
Marlessa Wesolowski is a Canadian painter based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her work explores the meeting point between abstraction, nature, and our evolving social and ecological landscape. Rooted in the prairie horizon that shaped her vision, she translates vastness and rhythm into a stylized visual language of balance, tension, and renewal.
A self-taught artist with over twenty-five years of practice, painting has been Wesolowski's foundation while also exploring film, textile, and collaborative forms. Working primarily in oil on linen and canvas, her subjects are evolving—her current focus creates abstract, stylized allegories that examine how we inhabit, alter, and belong
to the more-than-human world.
For more than two decades, she has served as artist-in-residence at St. Paul's Hospital, where she co-founded the Healing Arts Program. Working directly with patients and community, she uses art as a pathway for healing and connection. She also mentors healthcare students, provides educational workshops, and speaks at conferences about the power of arts in healthcare. She earned her Master of Arts in Expressive Arts Therapy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland in 2019, graduating magna cum laude.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Ukrainian Museum of Canada and is held in the Canadiana Fund Crown Collection, as well as in private collections across North America.
about
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© 2016 by Marlessa Wesolowski (mars). created with Wix.com