Marilee Sartori:She Is Art.

Story By Mary Ellen Thompson
Photos By John Wollwerth

There is a slight misconception that Marilee Sartori is an artist. The proper perception is that she is art, from the top of her head, with her trademark spiky hair, to her bejeweled expressive hands, right on down to her sparkly pink shoes. Marilee adores glitz and glam, a quality you can’t just stand back and admire in her, because her very manner is infectious. When she laughs, you will join her and not even know why, other than it just feels so good. And just like that, her art feels good too. Her art is her house, her family, her decorating, her presentation, her cooking, her beautifully written thank you notes and a myriad of paintings. As one might imagine, her art is as fluid as her many talents, she does not have a “style.” One day she might paint a huge red and gold palm tree, the next a tutu clad ballerina frog; another day she can be found with a series of paint brushes in her mouth while she works on a complex wall mural, or a lush seascape, or a modernistic woman hailing a cab in the city.
Marilee Sartori notices things; she takes them all in and returns them back to life, in life as well as on canvas. When she and her husband, Don, entertain, it is like walking into a piece of art. Fifty years of marriage has melded them into a perfect team.
However easy she may make everything seem, that is anything but the case. When Marilee was born it was discovered that her birth mother had tuberculosis, and mother and daughter had to be immediately separated. Her father didn’t know what to do with a tiny baby and a wife who was thought to be terminally ill, so Marilee was given to family friends to raise. As luck would have it, Marilee’s story has continued to have many happy endings; one of which was that an antibiotic was discovered in time to save her birth mother’s life. A brief summation is that Marilee was adopted by the family friends, but was able to maintain some contact with her birth parents.
Although her adopted mother was a celebrated artist in Marilee’s hometown of Paducah, Kentucky, Marilee didn’t follow suit for many years. “My mother sent me to one art school after another, but they kept sending me home with notes that said something like ‘Don’t waste your money.’ Then she tried to teach me to paint, but that didn’t work either. My mother was the oldest of nine children; in those days being an artist was not a popular option so my mother went to secretarial school, but painting was her passion. It was not until some years later that I followed in her footsteps. In the meanwhile, having been in Catholic School all my life, I begged and begged to go to college at the University of Kentucky. When I got there, I did everything but study because for all those years with the nuns you couldn’t do anything but learn, fancy that!” Marilee laughs. “So at Christmas break of my freshman year, my father showed up at U of K to pick me up and after Christmas I was safely ensconced at the good Catholic girls college, Webster College in St. Louis, MO.”