Laura Cesari of California - Fantasy Deco Dreamworld Artist

2023, Invisibility series retrospective! Invisible Woman and Millenium Armchair, actually together in a picture.

2019, in my home in the Pacific Coast Mountains, with Antelope Woman Quilt, an old favorite piece I made in 1998 in a class with legendary artist Faith Ringgold.

2010, with Northern Hemisphere Latitudes necklaces, an infographic jewelry series I designed to measure the distances of the Latitudes, with each bead representing 50 miles, for Chain of Being Jewelry Co.

2009, I love ridiculous, misunderstood, exotic-hybrid problem cats. I've adopted and rehabilitated four of them over the years. Don't worry, they just need cat whispering. Photo by JP Li.

2008, sittin' in a tree... with my amazing partner Jeremy Richardson.

2005, San Diego. Best weather for block printing! I started the Fabulous Wallflowers series here.

1997, in San Diego, with Invisibility: Millenium Table. Photo by Amanda Byer.

1978, at Laguna Seca Raceway, watching my dad race a vintage car that he and my mom restored. Super adorabeezle jumpsuit by my mom, a longtime designer for Lorrie Deb by Emma Domb of San Francisco.

My great-grandfather, Giuseppe Luccarotti, designed the terrazzo floor for the San Francisco City Hall in 1915, around the time when many of my ancestors came to California from the Mediterranean, Himalayas, and South America. It's immortalized in the hilarious and adorable film 'Bedazzled' in this scene, with Elizabeth Hurley's epic eye-roll and Brendan Fraser's exuberant victory dance, where (spoiler alert!) Elliott realizes he still has his Soul.

Original Lines, Feral Beauty

Inspired by decorative arts, fantasy, and folklore, my artwork is intended to be feral, unrooted, and timeless.

I'm obsessed with making my own original lines, reflecting on the themes I've seen and felt as a 5th-generation Californian artist: I'm an especially big fan of Cali's folk arts evolution from our early-1900's Art Deco to our 1960's-70's Psychedelic Art Nouveau resurgence, and motifs inspired by my roots in the Mediterranean, Himalayas, and South America.

In hybridizing these elements, I've made my own unique multicultural dreamworld of mythical numinae in surreal nature-inspired landscapes that show a harmony and connection between humans, animals, plants, and the Universe.

We grow up on tales of mermaids, angels, dragons, and fairies, and we accept these mythical creatures with a sense of imaginative childlike wonder. I hope my hybrid beings and multicultural deco drawings can inspire people to think inclusively and love each others' differences in the same way that we love mermaids, angels, dragons, and fairies. ♥

Honorable Mentions

My work has been featured by ELLE and ELLE DECOR magazines, The Planetary Society, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Public Radio (NPR), Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art of Western Spain (MEIAC), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA New York), and The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

STEAM Design and Collaborations

I confess, I'm a huge nerd! ♥ I love the intersection of art and technology, and I've also worked for many years in graphic design, animation, information design, and interface design, focusing on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) industry design projects.

For a few selected examples of my STEAM design work, please visit my Design Page.

Academics

I studied at the University of California, San Diego, with emphasis in Studio Arts and Computing Arts, and earned a Stewart Prize in art study and support from the Russell Grant and U.S. Grants foundations.

Magnanimity & Environmentalism

My official alignment is Chaotic Good; and it's probably also the closest thing I have to a religion. Exemplified in dynamic characters like Robin Hood and Fa Mu Lan, a Chaotic Good philosophy demands that we re-examine laws and rules, honoring truth and considering what will actually be helpful to people as a whole. I do my best to work with people and companies who are doing something good for the world, and to walk away from everyone else. And I'm lucky: I live in a land where I don't have to be an outlaw, but I may be known to break the rules of what an artist, designer, model, business owner, tech nerd, or lady should do - oops! ♥

And, I try to give back whatever I can to repair any damage done by anyone from my dumbass family, or by really any dumbass humans ever. At this time, I'm mostly giving back air: I live in a comically-small "tiny home" under enough Giant Redwoods to offset a minimum of approximately 450 average humans'-worth of carbon emissions (yes, average car-driving, gas-guzzling, grid-dwelling, appliance-using regular humans). It will never be enough, but I like that the air doesn't discriminate, anyone can breathe it. Go trees! ♥

Family History, Legends, and Folklore

Yes, those Cesari! Somehow I'm part of this family of legendary weirdos. And now everyone has a translator in their pocket and asks me, so here goes:

So I'm maybe-or-maybe-not related to radical freedom fighter Michelina; glorious exaggerative renaissance painters Bernardino and Cavaliere d'Arpino Giuseppe; horse whisperer Caligula or party boy Nero or any of the other mysterious twelve-or-twenty-something Caesars; or ancient Rome's controversial racially-integrated first family Julius, Cleopatra, and Cesarion-Jesus (and calm down, it barely changes either retelling, I love them both! Besides, shouldn't it actually be about the things he did?). ♥ ♥ ♥

In any case, it is my true born name, and I've had to live with it my entire life, and so I've had to discuss and speculate about these legends my entire life too.

In retelling and discussing these wild family legends, I confess, I've developed a severe allergy to hype and thrall, and maybe an unusual tendency to do my own thing. I try to learn from their legendary mistakes, and also to understand their intentions. And, weirdly enough, many of the ideals they stood for; Chaotic Good, creative expression, animal rights, gay rights, food security, racial integration, and compassion; are still interesting points in conversations today.

Are the stories true or false? Accurate or exaggerated? The stories of the emperors were written at a similar time as the Aeneid and New Testament. Do we take those seriously? Likely these stories are drenched in a heavy syrup of metaphor. I love all the interpretations, from Suetonius to Shakespeare, Mel Brooks to Mary Beard. With this name, a sense of humor is absolutely required: I collect the memes and movie posters!

People sometimes make all kinds of weird assumptions about me owning a bunch of hotels or casinos or pizza restaurants or spooky olde ruins, or luxuriating on a lovely ancestral fortune that was miraculously saved before the empire fell. At first this bothered me, (che casino! haha), but then I realized it was a really great way to filter out assumptive jerks and idiots who didn't pay attention in history class. (And I want to be clear: I don't care if people name things after legends, it's just pretty silly when people assume I get a dollar every time someone visits the Coliseum, because I really, really don't.) ♥

Despite all the fun Cesari folklore and hype, my most famous ancestor who I've actually met is on my Mom's side, my great-grandfather Giuseppe Luccarotti, who designed the terrazzo floor of San Francisco City Hall in 1915, around the time when many of my ancestors came to California from the Mediterranean, Himalayas, and South America. It's immortalized in the hilarious and adorable Chaotic Good film 'Bedazzled' in the scene with Elizabeth Hurley's epic eye-roll and Brendan Fraser's exuberant victory dance, where (spoiler alert!) Elliott realizes he still has his Soul.

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