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.
Wild Ones:
Art of Adaptation
Wild One's Series 2025/2026
Wild One's reflects on resilience at the intersection of nature and human-made environments. Each painting depicts acts of care and survival.
The series speaks to adaptation, protection, and belonging in fractured landscapes. It invites the viewer to witness nature’s intelligence and tenderness, persisting even within systems not designed to hold it.
These paintings are invitations – pauses - for viewers to consider their relationship to place, responsibility, and renewal. Each function as a space to witness, feel, and reflect on our capacity for care in a world under pressure.
Natures moments
about
Marlessa Ann Wesolowski (b.1971)
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Marlessa Ann Wesolowski is a Canadian painter based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, whose work spans three decades of exploration - from geometric abstraction of her inner and outer worlds, to expressive, symbolically rich interpretive paintings that trace the beautiful and precarious relationship between humans and a world in profound transformation.
Rooted in the prairies, Marlessa’s visual language carries the imprint of those who shaped her most - her mother and grandmothers, the family matriarchs who grounded her in land, nature, and the rich traditions of her Ukrainian heritage; and her father, a painter and musician, whose lifelong devotion to creativity illuminated her own. As a third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian, the stories, symbols, and resilience embedded in her culture and ancestry move through her work as naturally as the vast prairie landscape she calls home.
Working in oil and acrylic on linen and canvas, she moves fluidly between the poetic and the political. She bears witness to beauty and tension, loss and renewal, and the quiet resilience of nature adapting to landscapes transformed. Her paintings invite viewers to notice what often goes unspoken; the hidden consequences of our choices, and the fragile enduring interconnectedness of all living things.
Art and creativity, for Marlessa, have always been something to share, not confined to a studio. In 2005, she co-founded the Healing Arts Program at St. Paul's Hospital in Saskatoon where she has spent over two decades as artist-in-residence. Her journey with patients, healthcare workers, and communities has fostered through creative expression, reflection, wellbeing, and transformation. This experience has shaped her deeply held belief that art, nature, culture, and care are inseparable forces. She holds a Master of Arts in Expressive Arts Therapy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland, earned magna cum laude in 2019.
Her work has been exhibited at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada and is held in the Canadiana Fund Crown Collection at Rideau Hall, as well as in private collections across North America.
Through painting, she creates spaces where art and its creation become an invitation to feel, to question, and to reconnect with both self and world.
about
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© 2016 by Marlessa Wesolowski (mars). created with Wix.com