Creative defiance and aesthetic pleasure are central in Marisa Segovia’s artwork. Maybe she’s born with it—maybe it’s marijuana.

“Smoking weed is a catalyst for me,” Segovia said. “I’ll bring vape pens and edibles to get high before class. It helps me relax and zone in—I’m free and don’t give any f***s when I smoke weed.”

Segovia’s love affair with lighting up and creating has enabled her to produce without constraint. She strays from traditional printmaking methods by incorporating an amalgam of mediums to satiate her hunger to innovate.

“Life is beautiful. I am inspired by everything and I am different in the way that I am experimental. People are not always going to like your work but that’s okay,” Segovia said.

Like every artist, Segovia takes criticism from her community. But her desire to create uncommon works breaks the shackles of conformity. She experiments with not only, print-making, but with photography, glass-blowing, ceramics and sculpture.

No matter the medium, cannabis almost always serves as Segovia’s artistic catalyst, launching her into a carefree and harmonious state.

“I usually go for a sativa since it’s stimulating. It’s easier for me to go with the flow especially with all the imperfections that happen. Something happened for a reason, so you just need to go with it,” she said.

Recently, four of Segovia’s screen prints went haywire and blew out leaving her with nothing before a pressed due date. But she used her frustration to her advantage.

“I drew a self-portrait with cacti poking out of me, and I wrote on it: ‘Grow with it.’ You can’t sulk. You have to embrace it. Go forward with it,” Segovia said.

Segovia’s sense of liberation is refreshing in a culture that is quick to label. Just like her work suggests, she infuses a variety of mediums not only to make her art more visually striking but to encourage unity between different art forms.

“I don’t want to be stuck to one medium. A lot of people think that they have to because they like to put labels on things, even in the art department. The new age artists are trying to break this idea that you have to be one thing or another. Interior architects feel like they’re separate from us, but we try to embrace them. Everyone is an artist,” Segovia said.

As Marisa Segovia kicks back and enjoys the simple pleasures of a fat blunt, she also happens to be revolutionizing the nature of contemporary art.

Follow her Instagram to see her work and her Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look.

Anisha Brady can be reached at [email protected] or @theorion_arts on Twitter.