Artist Marie Thibeault featured at the PV Art Center

A change in the weather

Marie Thibeault’s “Radiant Rupture” solo show is on view at the Palos Verdes Art Center

by Bondo Wyszpolski

If you’d welcomed a child into the world when I last interviewed Marie Thibeault, that young person would now be entering college. In other words, 17 years have elapsed, and when Marie and I last met up for a story she was exhibiting her Hurricane Katrina series, inspired by the catastrophic flooding that devastated much of New Orleans.

Although I’ve never lost touch with Marie, who lives in San Pedro with her husband, Bill, and their two poodles, when we sat down in a Torrance coffeeshop my first question was, What’s happened since our last chat? Which I guess was another way of saying, Okay, where have you gone with your art since Katrina?

But let me say first of all that the impetus for our conversation is Marie’s just-opened solo show at the Palos Verdes Art Center. Titled “The Radiant Rupture,” it features 18 paintings and 15 drawings. It’s up through April 11, so you still have plenty of time to see it if you haven’t already. What’s nice about this survey (as opposed to a retrospective) is that the drawings, the prep work, you might say, are usually not featured in her exhibitions. In Marie’s own words, “The drawings, which are a really critical part of my creative process, will lead to the painting.”

Well, catastrophic events are still happening, and that’s a through-line that Marie continues to plumb and explore. “As with Katrina, many of these were caused by the increasing destabilization brought about by climate change. Events such as the Fukushima earthquake and Deepwater Horizon helped to expand my understanding of the struggle between manmade industrial structures and the natural world.”

But Marie doesn’t have to look so far afield, and her inspiration or focus can be regional as well as global.

“Turning my sights closer to home, I explored a series informed by researching the import-export dynamics of the Port of Los Angeles. The work culminated in a solo show titled ‘Conveyance’ at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 2019.

“Subsequent works addressed the firestorms and heavy rains of the 2020-2022 seasons and the effect on the California landscape. In 2023, I dedicated a year to painting (after) witnessing the dynamic transformation of a local Peck Park canyon that I walk and photograph daily. The canyon was transformed by a fire earlier that year, then again radically transformed by heavy rains, floods, and a superbloom.”

“The Radiant Rupture” includes paintings — “Freefall,” “Wild Gravity,” “Altamira” — informed by landslides near where Marie lives, as well as in Rancho Verdes and presumably Portuguese Bend, which for those residing there has been akin to their own Hurricane Katrina.

Or, to put it more succinctly, “Most of the work in this show alludes to the cyclical structure of collapse and regeneration, which have increased in frequency and intensity as our environment changes.”

The ecological element is clearly front and center in Marie’s work, and currently — by default — is political as well, now with a callous U.S. President who doesn’t sniff any financial gain by being respectful to the environment. Sure, you can hug a tree, but why do that when you can sell it to a lumberyard and put a few bucks in your wallet?

The Earth is a living entity, and earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and fires have been part of the package since Day One, but hurricanes and heatwaves, downpours and droughts — as scientists have shown — are pushed along by mankind’s ever-widening footprint. We seem to be moving from climate change to climate shift to climate collapse, and I wonder if we’ll still be speculating on the arrival of “the tipping point” long after the tipping point has arrived.

Marie Thibeault is closely attuned to such things, and this has been her persistent focus going back decades, “centered on the evolving impact of environmental stress on the landscape… I am interested in how we perceive these changes, how we try to halt or adapt to them, and how these efforts transform our imagination and our experience of place. Through painting, I seek to embody notions of change, flux, instability, and reconciliation.”

Her style, her painterly signature, is unmistakable, and it was arrived at after years of study and making art. Each viewer will have their interpretation of it, and one impression may be that of lively intersecting lines or arteries, some geometric, some organic, like an explosion or whirlwind on “pause”. There’s a struggle, a tussle, a push-pull between the forces of nature and mankind’s attempt to assert its will by what we construct or pollute. And you will see, if you look deep into each piece, traces of our human intervention, outlines of homes or office buildings or vehicles. Sometimes strands of police caution tape. It’s as if a grid is collapsing on itself or trying to wrestle order from chaos.

That’s just one possible take. The paintings are large, and they beckon us to come ever closer. Our ever-shifting world is reflected in them along with the question of how we will confront and adapt to the challenges ahead, and to those challenges already here.

Marie Thibeault: The Radiant Rupture is on view through April 11 at the Palos Verdes Art Center, 5504 Crestridge Road, Rancho Palos Verdes. An artist talk and walkthrough, with guest Mirabel Wigon, is scheduled for April 4, from 1 to 3 p.m. Gallery hours: Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call (310) 541-2479 or visit pvartcenter.org. PEN