Los Angeles, California: a bright, flashy hub of talent where artists, movie stars, and writers come to make a name for themselves.
But for some people, living in the city means more than finding a path to stardom.
It means putting on a full face of makeup just to go to the supermarket. It means making new friends, and then leaving a set and never seeing them again. It means feeling pressured to attend dinner after dinner after dinner.
At least, that’s what Hawaiʻi-based artist Danielle Rush says. After working as a makeup artist in the LA film industry for over 20 years, she packed up her brushes and moved to Oʻahu. She wanted something different.
It was there that she stepped away from movie sets and began creating a new form of art, one that blends photography, painting, and makeup. She coined it “illuminated ART.”
“It literally turned me from someone who was somewhat depressed to somebody who had created a new happiness and a whole new world for myself,” Rush said. “I feel like I came out of the darkness once I moved here.”
Now — seven years, one gallery, and a whole career change later — Rush is the force behind The ART House, an up-and-coming gallery in Waikīkī that seeks to highlight and connect local artists.
The gallery is located at the Waikīkī Marriott Resort & Spa. Aside from Rush’s work, it showcases pieces by over 20 local artists and 30 small businesses, representing every major island in the state. Featured artists include Kris Goto, Judd Boloker, Marionette Taboniar, and Danielle Burnside.
The ART House is not meant to be exclusive, according to Rush. And while space is limited, she is working on a way to make room for everyone.
Rush said that she opened the gallery as a way to give back to the community of local artists that helped her build her career — a community that she claims would have been hard to come by in LA.
“To start as a visual artist and to get where I’ve gotten in the short amount of time, that is only for the help of others. It is literally the selflessness of friends of mine who have been artists, who have known what to do in order to push me forward,” Rush said. “And honestly, it was with nothing in return. It was just out of the graciousness of their heart, because they thought I was doing something amazing and they wanted me to do well.”
In addition to offering artists a space for their creations, The ART House is hosting a Featured Artist Series every two months. Next month’s artist goes by the name "Mouse Hawaii."
A self-taught landscape photographer, Mouse describes himself as a “solo-person.” Everything about his artistic process, he does alone: shooting, printing, traveling, showing. But when Rush presented him with an opportunity to feature his work in Waikīkī for the first time, his mindset began to shift.
“Danielle is the only one that opened that door for me,” Mouse said. “Having D reach out is almost like a partnership and a friendship that I’m learning, and I love it because it’s so new to me.”
To Rush, that kind of experience is precisely what drove her to open The ART House in the first place.
“I’m really creating relationships with people, and that’s something that, in the film industry, is not real — it’s fake. You make a lot of these friends, but then you leave a show and you never talk to these people again,” she said. “I’m interested in creating relationships that are deep, that are real, that are with people that understand where I’m coming from.”
