Palos Verdes Art Center has been featuring an extensive run, since January, of The Radiant Rupture, a very special solo exhibition of a 10 year survey of paintings by San Pedro based artist Marie Thibeault. The show will run until April 11.
For more than four decades, Marie’s studio practice has been devoted to examining landscapes shaped by environmental strain. Elements of infrastructure and architecture function as framing devices in Marie’s works, set against the effects of active natural phenomena such as atmosphere, water and fire.
Entering the main gallery, you are immediately immersed within vast, dynamic compositions of luminous, atmospheric fields of color and the artist’s complex abstract vocabulary. Marie’s large-scale works are in flux, representing landscapes — including Peck Park Canyon, the Palos Verdes Peninsula landslide and the Port of Los Angeles — juxtaposed with human intervention and climate-related trauma. Her works mark conditions of rupture and instability, while unveiling the transformation these environs undergo from minute to immense.
“When something breaks, something much better could come out of it,” said Marie during our walkthrough. “Or something mysterious could come out of it. And the colors are expressing that.”
Two of Marie’s paintings, Shield and Clipper, were made in response to the ships in the harbor. Shield’s multi-layers of vibrant jewel-tones depict stacks, directional lines and columns above a reflective blue ocean. At center, a fine, circular form exudes electric energy encapsulating a perpetual force. Shield was one of the first of the series. Marie noted its title suggests the body is shielded from some of the cacophony or the impact of industrial sound and development, and visual structure. Shield’s sister painting, Exposure, sold, which indicated the opposite, as in being exposed to all the discordance.
The works’ titles — Shield and Exposure — are a manifestation that many Harbor Area residents who exist near the industrial ports are keenly aware of.
Her composition, Clipper, prominent in blues, greens and white, possesses an astonishing reflective quality at the canvas base. Above that is a string of red-coral-toned octagonal forms. Toward the top, a green panel centers frenetic color strokes in blue, green and yellow.
These paintings are from a series created when the professor emeritus worked at Cal State University Long Beach and commuted over the Vincent Thomas Bridge, witnessing daily all the containers and the shipping activity. Marie recalled wondering where the body is in terms of its relationship to this extensive industrial complex as well as the vast ocean expanse.
Many of the structural components in her paintings are the abundant stacks of containers at the port. These repeated forms, Marie explained, eventually became their own entity and presented a way for her to work with a notion of containment and lack of containment.
“That is everywhere in the work right now,” Marie said, “as a metaphor for the environment … what can we hold together? And what can’t we? What is out of our control?
“As the work has evolved, there’s this notion of embodiment. So I think of painting as a way to have all of this unfolding meaning while it’s affecting your body. I see the paintings as something you behold … you look at it, and read it, and it moves.”
Marie’s painting evolution
An abstracted horizon runs through most of her compositions. It signifies the demarcation of sky and earth while evoking the feeling of symmetrical balance. This structure holds layered images and forms that Marie has sourced from cartographic references, drone footage of flooded cities, weather charts and photographs of her encounters with specific places. Forms repeat and compound as they merge with a light source, density and gravities’ pull, within shifting color planes that abstract and reference the source material.
These ideas were being developed during the same time as Marie’s drawings and subsequently a series about Peck Park Canyon.
Her drawing, Silver Melt, is an abstract representation of a glacial melt. During a residency in Bend, Oregon that Marie participated in, she noticed the streams there are silver because of the different minerals that come down from the glaciers. Her conceptual memory drawing depicts remnants of what were once glaciers, including white outlines of the ice formation that no longer exists. Below, sit glacial forms, the green/silver cast is present, but nearly transparent; a foretelling of what has come to pass with the glacial melts occurring in both hemispheres.
Her painting Beautiful Burnout references a time when, right after the 2023-2024 California fires, the floods came. Marie walks the park daily and has seen many changes. During the pandemic, a fire occurred and went through the canyon. Beautiful Burnout is a striking painting, with its deep maroon, burst of aqua blue, green palms and earth toned colors. Intuitively, Marie’s composition collides with the body as a part of this environment. It depicts the walking bridge, ground debris, a black rod iron fence that runs around the park. During these storms a giant palm tree fell, many of its branches broken.
“The palm trees were just charred black, but also red, like this red leather,” Marie said. “And people came through and graffitied on it. The whole thing was beautiful but devastating. The color gradations are a way to talk about temperature extremes and it’s also an abstract element. Then people came and put caution tape on it and they tied little bows with the tape. It struck me as bittersweet; beautiful but funny, but sad.”
While still working with the harbor imagery, Marie came across an upside-down tree that she photographed during her time in Idlewild. In Golden State, she blended nature, in the form of this tree, and the industry together. In this process, a yellow line, projected from a stencil, appeared almost like a figure to her. This was after the California wildfires, it resembled a fire line. Between nature, the industry, and the fires, Marie concluded it was a portrait of California, hence, Golden State, which became the poster image for this show. Its top portion depicts a bright, almost transparent sky/ocean blue, palm branches are transposed onto this plane that sits above a golden earth expanse that fills the lower half of this dynamic work.
While studying geology online through Stanford University, Marie learned about the mechanisms of the earth, the tectonic plates, the way systems work, and the hydrosphere and ecosphere. Marie, a color theory expert, said it was way over her head but she learned a lot and it got her interested in these geological structures that underpin the architecture of the earth’s crust. A work that stemmed from this is Oceanic, which relates to melting and the water cycle ring and falling, and what is affecting our coastal areas. The windows in the painting, Marie said, are a part of the color theory that she thinks about with big planes of color, but she noted it also became “like a window of what could be happening behind you.”
“Then there’s another part of the expanse,” she said. “We’re all affected, but we can see multiple views from one place. Standing in this cool landscape, thinking about the rock structures, there’s also this idea that right behind you it’s burning. You never can just experience a single landscape anymore because we’re always aware of the precarious state of the environment that we’re faced with.”
Her painting Altamira, meaning high view, references the ancient Altamira landslide complex, which is the deeper, larger, and faster-moving component of the major active landslide on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
“That’s the one that’s actually moving … the one we need to address, while we’re trying to mitigate the other ones [that are] up high, like bandaids,” said Marie.
She said the windows in Altamira similarly reflect different elements, like fires and more. The pink is pressure and the blue represents the flood and blue tarps everywhere. A winding thick line seen in several of her paintings and drawings illustrates the road or the water.
People experiencing disasters often take pictures and Marie collects these images.
“People take pictures from the inside out and there’s this chaos inside,” Marie said. “But there’s always a way out of it, like a window … I’m working with this imagery now. It’s deeply psychological to me, like maybe being in an accident and waking up and realizing you can get through that portal. I read about it and I feel very urgent. [With] every little change I see in the landscape, I’m informed to think about what it is and what can be saved, what is collapsing, what those cycles are ….and acceleration … the weight of excess, and does this weight impede efforts to hold everything up? If you look at the pictures in Palos Verdes when it was collapsing, it’s like [a] band aid [solution]. That’s the impulse behind this one.”
Marie takes notions from the landscape and then, she explained, she sees the paintings almost as a mechanism.
“Some painters think of painting as a machine … you look at it and this clicks to that and that clicks to something,” she said … “it’s an interactive set of structures and contrasts. That’s why it’s complex, because I’m actually trying to resolve a lot of these correlations.
“I think The Radiant Rupture is a good title because it does show this force that we can’t control,” Marie said.
– Join an artist talk and guided walkthrough with guest Mirabel Wigon, from 1 to 3 p.m., April 4. The show runs to April 11.
Time: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Cost: Free
Details: https://pvartcenter.org
Venue: PVAC, 5504 Crestridge Road Rancho Palos Verdes