Marie Thibeault and June Edmonds, Consciousness Through the Lens of Abstraction

This site hosts audio only. To see the video of this special episode, please go to, https://youtu.be/8NdUlrhpjHkMarie is an internationally exhibited painter. Her oil paintings address the tension of urban landscape and the natural world. Inspired by frequent walks through various trails and open spaces in California, her work reveals her observations of the changes and dynamics of nature in the face of the ongoing climate crisis. Engaging notions of abstraction, her work references the surrounding landscape using atmospheric color shifts, fragmented imagery and multiple viewpoints to suggest the ideas of flux, change and instability in the environment. Marie taught painting and color theory at CSULB for 30 years, where she developed an Advanced Studies in Color class.June is a recipient of the COLA Fellowship, the Guggenheim and the California Community Foundation, Fellowship for Visual Artists.  June uses abstract painting to explore how color, repetition, movement, and balance can serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal connection to her African-American roots. Exploring the psychological construct of skin color or tone through pattern and abstract painting has proven to be a revealing gesture and these ideas are explored in her two ongoing series: the Energy Wheel Paintings inspired by her meditation practice and her Flag Paintings, which explore the alignment of multiple identities such as race, nationality, gender, or political leanings.  June’s public art works include a Venetian glass mosaic at the Metro Pacific Station in Long Beach Influences: Marie has two main influences: first, the New York abstract school where her formalist abstract artist teachers were students of the pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hoffman. That experience that has always remained with her. Second, were her teachers Elmer Bishoff and Joan Brown at Berkeley, members of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Marie always loved the California painting of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud and the landscape expanse.June’s influences include Varnette Honeywood, Romare Beardon, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, David Hockney and Alma Thomas. Another influence was the 1976 LACMA show ‘Two Centuries of Black American Art.’ These works had a profound, formative impact upon June. Other inspiration/explorations have drawn from cultural and African American historical references, sacred geometry and very recently, the Benin emblem of the river leaf.Find more information at: www.mariethibeault.com  and www.luisdejesus.com/artists/june-edm