MARIAN'S STORY
Marian Carapezza currently lives in Monterey, California, but was raised in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, and was the only girl of five children. It was here that she was constantly exposed to art. Her father loved art passionately and took every opportunity to collect works of art and art books, as well as make numerous visits to museums. Both her mother and father studied art and "dabbled" in watercolor painting as a hobby. However, Marian believed deeply for the first forty years of her life that she was totally incapable of any artistic creativity.
In 1969, she got married and moved to Rhode Island, where she lived for the next 17 years. It was there, in addition to raising her two sons, that she worked as a daycare director. During that same time period, she went back to school and acquired her Master's in Social Work. Ms. Carapezza came to the Monterey Peninsula with her family in 1986. From her first view of the rouch California coast, she found immediate inspiration for her artistic and personal work. She felt deeply moved by the spirit and physical beauty that surrounded her. When her husband moved to Washington, Marian decided to remain and make Monterey her permanent home.
Marian has not studied art formally. She felt blessed when the ability to create, to sculpt human figures out of sandstone and porcelain, mysteriously flowed out of the tips of her fingers for the first time in 1989. From that time, she has been encouraged to continue to explore the medium of ceramics. This has allowed her an expression of an inner reality that she was unable to express verbally. Ms. Carapezza works exclusively with the female human figure that she hand sculpts in stoneware or porcelain. Each piece is kiln-fired twice, and is usually left unpainted and unglazed. "I don't put makeup on my body, so I don't feel a need to decorate my figures", she says. Each piece cries out to be held and viewed intimately, demanding a relationship with its viewer.
Marian continues to attend Carmel adult classes at the Sunset Center, and to sculpt from home when she is not at her professional duties as a social worker at Natividad Hospital in Salinas. She is determined that her work be as honest and as true to her inner experience with life as she can possibly craft it; to express a personal communication that she hopes the viewer will appreciate and relate to. Ultimately, Marian asks that her little bodies speak for themselves.
