Biography

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Marsha Salyer Jorgensen graduated in 1988 from the University of South Dakota with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and emphasis in Graphic Design. She has worked as a scenic artist in the movie industry and as an interior landscape designer for a Los Angeles firm handling Los Angeles International Airport, the Carnation building and several other buildings and celebrity clients.

 

For several years while working as an elementary school librarian, she wrote the curriculum and lesson plan and trained docents for art programs in the Conejo Valley Unified School District servicing thousands of students. She has dabbled in free lance design and desktop publishing, earning the Past Presidents’ Award for the Best New Journal for The American Amateur Press Association for her publication Elemenopea. 

In the summer of 2008, Marsha quit working to pursue her own art seriously for the first time in nearly 20 years. Since then she has had mixed media  and digital collage work and articles published several times in Somerset Studio and other international print and internet magazines.  In 2012, several of Marsha's pieces were included in Martin Dawber's book, Modern Vintage Illustration.

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In 2010, Marsha began marketing a line of collage image collections for use by other artists.  Met with an overwhelming response to her restored and altered vintage imagery, Marsha continues to spend a great deal of her time collecting vintage images and paper.  Restoring and altering her collection digitally has become as  equally important to her as creating her own art pieces.

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Marsha has lived in the Los Angeles area over 25 years with her husband, Kent, whom she met and married while attending the University of South Dakota. They have two grown children.

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Artist Statement

 

“For the last few years, I have been working with small mixed media  and digital collages, exploring a completely different style of imagery than what I studied formally at the University of South Dakota many years ago. I find great satisfaction and freedom in using and reconstructing vintage images and creating new melancholy characters. I most often use photographs from the early 20th century usually from my large and growing antique ephemera collection, and other photographs now in the public domain.

 

"I am interested in creating small vignettes, small works that I hope offer an instant lighthearted and simple visual connection without the burden of trying to communicate a deep social or philosophical message.  I prefer a clumsy, funky, odd piece of art with a hint of humor and mystery."

 

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