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“The purpose of art is to inform and delight.” | “There is no art. There are only artists.”

I used to have a studio called “The Blue Platypus”. “Platypus” because this animal has always fascinated me: he will never know what a headache he was to the taxonomists of the 19th Century. A duck? That has the tail of a beaver, and that does not lay eggs? Poor platypus, so wrong, and so right in his uniqueness and ignorance. Without knowing that platypuses were not easy to be classified, he was what was. Deal with it!

It was complicated to keep a name that people found difficult to spell or understand. The “blue” came just to guarantee a unique domain and also make things more complicated. So my name was all that people remembered in the end. Marina Petric sounds weird as well – but at least it is a people’s name, and my name.

“Marina” is both latin and slavic: my father was from Serbia (therefore my Petric) and my mother, from Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, where I was born and raised. I studied architecture and later, like my freak-of-nature friend platypus, I did a masters in History of Science. I still wonder what the function of such Master’s in my life is — maybe I will one day find out. One thing I know though, is that the Masters at COPPE/UFRJ was a wonderful time, and I would do it over and over again. My thesis was (roughly speaking) about Artificial Intelligence and the role of consciousness in it (thesis here).

I moved to the U.S. after getting married in 2004, and lived for one year in a boat in Santa Barbara, California. Never my name was so well-justified. Then we moved to Austin, Texas, where I finally discovered that working only with architecture in the U.S. was not for me. Once I started to work with graphic design, illustration and photos, things simply started to flow right. I only miss giving free-hand drawing classes to Architecture and Graphic Design students in Rio, where I taught at the Federal University for a few years.

I have won some prizes with design, and hope to continue working with it for a long time – as well as taking photos and working on them. I work at Cinsay, Inc. as a user experience designer. I live in a house in South Austin, that I share with my husband, my Border Collie Truffles, and 4 cats that I love (one of them came from Brazil and like me, has dual citizenship. His name is Penguin).