This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.

Lesa Marino: Meet the Mascot

Lesa Marino couldn’t have anticipated what would come from ringing Lauren Feltz’s doorbell last fall. All she planned was a welcoming gesture to a new resident of the neighborhood.

Even then, she didn’t want to ignore COVID-19 restrictions.

“I had on a mask and it was outdoors,” Lesa explains.

Feltz is the new principal of Deep River Elementary School, a position she assumed in the fall. One of the first things she had asked the Board of Education at a meeting after accepting the new job was whether the school had a mascot and what the school color was. She learned the color was maroon and the mascot was an eagle, but there was no image for the mascot.

Feltz, who has been a principal in Wilton and as assistant principal in Berlin, was familiar with the role a good mascot could play in school spirit and more.

“It gives the school a brand, something to rally around and that has real value,” Feltz says.

In searching for a suitable image, she decided it was inadvisable to download existing eagle graphics, even those that weren’t copyrighted. Instead, Feltz asked her neighbor Lesa, an artist and illustrator with more than 30 years of experience, to design one.

Feltz had a particular vision of an eagle in mind: a friendly looking eagle. Lesa agreed. She didn’t want the mascot too look too fierce, nor did she want it to look too much like a cartoon figure.

“I wanted it to look strong and regal but not too scary,” Lesa says.

And that’s how River, the Deep River Elementary School eagle mascot, came to be. Feltz says more than 100 names were suggested by students and staff; River came out the top choice.

Lesa, who grew up in West Haven, says she has spent a lifetime explaining to people that her first name is really spelled with an e, not an i.

“It was my mother’s brilliant idea. It sounds like it should be with an e,” she says.

She has known ever since she won a poster design contest in second grade that she wanted to be a commercial artist. After graduating from Paier College of Art, then located on Prospect Street in New Haven, she started out by designing cards and wrapping paper.

Today Lesa still does graphic designs for cards and gift wrapping, but her graphics world now includes everything from puzzles and dinnerware to fabrics used in garments, not only for women but for men and children as well. Products with her graphics have been sold in major retail outlets like Target and Walmart.

Her long and varied graphics career has taught Lesa lessons well beyond creating a successful design. It has also taught a life lessons in the tricky art of accepting suggestions and criticism.

“I have learned to accept critiques from art directors,” she says. “Most people are gentle and everybody is trying to figure it out. In a collaboration, the end product it better.”

Along the way in her graphic design career, Lesa had to update how she did her work, from using paper and drawing supplies to computer graphics.

“It’s totally different now than when it was just paper, pencil, and paint,” she says.

She went back to school, to Middlesex Community College, to learn the new electronic skills that are necessary in today’s design world. She did well in class, but once the exam came, she had problems.

“I froze, totally froze,” she recalls.

She came out of the experience well, nonetheless, actually writing the code for her website lisamarino.com herself. Her studio now has computers as well as her sets of paints and crayons.

One of the most important things Lesa learned about the art business at Paier had nothing to do with graphic design but rather with job opportunity.

“I learned in art school never to say ‘No’; go learn to do it, figure it out,” she says. “It makes life exciting.”

She may also have learned that lesson from her father, a skilled carpenter and toolmaker who built a two-seater airplane himself, starting in his basement and finishing in the garage.

“It had foldable wings,” Lesa explains.

The plane was no land-bound curiosity; it flew. Lesa explains her father had a heart attack during the building and thus was no longer qualified to fly it, but he sat next to the pilot in the two-seater plane when it did fly.

As she remembers her late father’s determination to complete the airplane, Lesa recites lines from the poem “It Couldn’t Be Done”: “He tackled the thing that couldn’t be done and he did it.”

Lesa met her husband Pete, now with his own carpentry business, when she was working as a waitress at a restaurant in New Haven and he was a chef. After marrying, the two set out cross-country in a camper for the California and spent five years there before returning to Connecticut. They have lived in Deep River for some 30 years.

Lesa gave the elementary school slides of River, the new mascot, in different poses so the image can be used in different situations. So far, River has decorated certificates given to participants in the school’s invention convention, but there is far more in the offing. Principal Feltz can envision River the elementary school eagle on everything from stationery to T-shirts.

Lesa’s connection with Deep River Elementary goes well beyond designing the mascot. She was delighted to take on the task because her own two daughters had gone to the school. She had even once taught an after-school art class for its students.

“I love that school; I always have,” she says.