Contributed by Sharon Butler / From June 15 to 19, Two Coats of Paint will be hosting LA artist Marie Thibeault for her second residency. Marie has spent years immersed in the world of color and geometry, vividly translating the rigid language of architecture, the logic of technical data, and the unpredictable realm of human emotion onto the canvas. She explores the intersection of science and imagination in visual stories of environmental instability that incorporate references to scientific diagrams, predictive models, cartographic references, geological graphics, weather charts, and photographs. Although she employs abstraction to clear and substantial effect, she considers herself primarily a landscape painter and counts among her strongest influences Paul Cézanne, drawing especially on the dynamic horizontal planes of his work.
Drought, fire, flooding, and erosion are transforming the mountains, coastlines, and canyons of familiar and cherished vistas. For Thibeault’s latest paintings, source images have included photographs of locations altered by such climate-related traumas. Her overall compositions consistently allude to states of collapse. As I wrote a decade ago, “jangled, saturated color, buckling architectural forms, shifting landscape spaces, and jittery brushwork give visual form to the artist’s anxiety.” The pandemic has only sharpened her sense of alarm. Yet Thibeault controls and stabilizes the visual intricacy of her paintings with atmospheric color fields that bind each work into a cohesive whole and establishes, as she has put it, “tension between instability and balance, breakdown and recovery.” The layered visual webs of imagery bridge different time periods and places, embodying the complexity of human experience as well as environmental pathways.
About the artist: Marie Thibeault grew up in rural Connecticut and received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. She recently presented a solo exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art in Long Beach, CA, and her paintings have been included in exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA; Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, CA; and Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA. Thibeault’s work has been exhibited in London, Tokyo, Seoul, and Dusseldorf. Her work is in the public collections of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, and the Oakland Museum of Art in Oakland, CA, among others. She has been Artist in Residence at L’AiR Arts in Paris; Two Coats of Paint in Brooklyn, NY; and the US-Thai Exchange Program at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her work has been reviewed in multiple publications, including Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Artillery Magazine. Thibeault is affiliated with Von Fraunberg Art Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany and Ellio Fine Art in Houston, TX.
Marie Thibeault, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, Hosted by Sharon Butler, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. June 15–19, 2025. Please join us for an Open Studio: Tuesday, June 17, 5-8 pm.
Studio listening: Check out Marie’s playlist here.
For more information, or to arrange a studio visit, please contact: STAFF@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put MARIE THIBEAULT in the subject line.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
