Artist has left her mark all over Pittsburgh for decades
The Sarris Candies store in Canonsburg is artist Maria DeSimone Prascak’s Sistine Chapel.
Over the years, she’s transformed the shop and adjoining ice cream parlor into a colorful candyland using paint, clay, papier-mache and crystal embellishments. Prascak’s brush has touched 450 feet of murals, two columns, three ceiling domes, five bejeweled animals, seven bulkheads and an army of “Pretzel People.”
“The murals tell the history of Sarris Candies. There are little things hidden throughout that are personal to our family, like my dad’s dog,” President Bill Sarris says. “When customers come in, they don’t grab something and walk out. They spend time here looking around.”
When she ran out of wall space, Prascak illustrated a children’s book about the local landmark.
“The Day the Chocolate Melted Away” by Uncle Dave Howard is available at Sarris Candies, Hallmark stores in Robinson Township and Downtown Pittsburgh and at Amazon.com.
The lifelong South Side resident launched Maria’s Ideas in 1982 when she was 19 years old. She created everything from greeting cards to airbrushed T-shirts. After sustaining a hand injury, she took time off to heal and reevaluate her career .
During visits to the library, books about murals kept catching her eye.
She took it as a sign.
More than two decades later, she’s added her personal touch to doctor’s offices, funeral homes, restaurants, libraries, churches, schools, airports and private residences around the region.
Clients are consulted and a full-color rendering is made before the project begins. The custom pieces are hand-painted on canvas or directly on the walls using low-VOC paints mixed on-site.
Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium boasts the lion’s share of her work. There’s a 55-foot-long African savannah scene by the carousel, nine beasts dispersed throughout Jambo Grill, a giant beach chair and “quick fact” signs in The Islands exhibit and colorful fence posts and an alligator drum in Kids’ Kingdom Playground.
While she was creating a rainforest on the walls of the Siamang Habitat, one of the lanky primates swiped her cellphone.
Sticky-fingered gibbons aside, Prascak says she loves her job.
“It takes me back to being a kid and getting a new box of crayons,” she says. “I’m getting paid to color.”
Vineyards are her most requested mural theme – she claims she can paint grapes in her sleep – but wildlife is her muse.
At The National Aviary on the North Side she’s known as “The Sloth Lady” thanks to her whimsical portraits of the slow-moving mammal. The facility also features her live bird painting demonstrations during its annual Wings & Wildlife Art Show.
She met her husband, artist Johno Prascak, at that event in 1988.
The couple work in separate studios inside their home, but collaborate and inspire each other.
They’ve both been commissioned by the Pittsburgh Penguins to do work: Maria made a 20-foot paint-by-numbers mural that fans could color before games. Her husband stylized the team’s logo to create a 500-piece puzzle.
Art is so therapeutic for Prascak that she felt the need to help others find peace through brushstrokes. Each month she teaches a painting class at Little Sisters of the Poor in Brighton Heights, where her mom is a resident. Some of the participants can’t see or hear very well. Others don’t speak. But they all enjoy painting.
They’re proud of their work, just as Prascak is proud of hers.
While strolling around the zoo on a recent afternoon, she smiled as people snapped selfies in front of one of her murals.
“Once I leave a project,” she says, “it’s nice to know that people are appreciating them.”
Kristy Locklin is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.
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