Local artist brings nature to life
Violent Hippie sounds like a contradiction but for artist Dessie Marshall it’s more of an artistic calling. Using the moniker Violent Hippie Leaf Art and armed with a razor blade she slices up one-of-a-kind leaf carvings aimed at bringing a distorted nature to the masses.
The carvings follow the natural shape of the leaf cutting out the middle and constructing figures from the existing veins. Marshall doesn’t begin a new piece with a specific idea in mind.“I just go in and kind of keep an open mind and take a look” she says. “As I see something I carve it into it.”
The result is intricately carved shapes of animals done freehand on her delicate canvasses culled from a variety of trees.
Marshall then presses the leaves and uses a resin coating to preserve the carvings. At times she uses a UV protector to preserve colour or sometimes lets the leaf change hues naturally.
Although she’s always been artistically inclined Marshall initially thought of working as a biologist or with the environment in one form or another. She didn’t consider art as a career until she discovered the shape of an elephant in a leaf she was studying. It became her first carving and essentially the start of a new life.
“There’s so much going on nowadays that very few people take the time to stop and study something from the natural world” says Marshall. “I’m hoping to get them to look close at something like that and see that shape is there that it’ll maybe cause them to want to go out on their own and spend a bit more time in nature.”
“This is just perfect to me because I’ve always just respected nature and I always wanted to do something along those lines to try and make a positive impact on the world.”
Originally from Drumheller Marshall developed a vivid imagination as a child aided by the fact that her family didn’t own a television. Shunning the life of a couch potato Marshall spent her youth searching for dinosaur fossils studying nature and watching insects embark on adventures. She attributes her unique childhood to her appreciation of nature.
Creating art was simply a hobby for Marshall however before she moved to Mexico in 2010 at the age of 24. “I didn’t have any confidence whatsoever in my ability to make a career out of it” she says. “I knew it was something neat and different but the reality of the possibilities hadn’t really hit me.”
The cross-continent move pushed Marshall out of her comfort zone inspiring her to throw caution to the wind and pursue her newfound passion.
“It felt like it just couldn’t go wrong and it didn’t” she says. “I really just want to travel the world. I want to live in adventure and seek the potential in this art.”
