When Marie Thibeault, an abstract landscape painter, began her talk in the Art Studio Lecture Series, she felt inclined to acknowledge a certain someone seated in the audience.

“I’m very excited that Wayne’s here,” Thibeault said.

Wayne, as in UC Davis Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud, pronounces his name the same way Marie Thibeault pronounces hers: tea-bow.

The two are of no relation, except by art and the fact that Thibeault drew inspiration from Thiebaud while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s.

“I soon after moved to San Francisco and was amazed that the hills, light, and cast shadows that I saw seemed to be manifestations of his paintings and not the other way around,” Thibeault wrote in an e-mail, “In other words, nature imitating art.”

Graduate student Aleksander Bohnak, the lecture series coordinator, said some kinds of art — like his, which he described as very intuitive — can be difficult to explain.

The lecture series, therefore, is invaluable to undergraduate students who can benefit by seeing how professional artists approach their work, Bohnak said.

“It is refreshing and inspiring to hear the clarity with which Marie Thibeault was able to communicate the thoughts and ideas she has while working.”

Thibeault received her Master of Fine Arts degree from UC Berkeley and then joined the faculty at California State University, Long Beach, where she has been a professor of art for 20 years.

For her latest work, she fuses imagery of disasters (Hurricane Katrina, for example) with elements of the sublime, and shines a light on environmental issues such as climate change.

“I wanted to paint the order in chaos and chaos in order. Physicist and writer David Bohm once said that chaos is just an infinitely complex order,” she said.

Constance Mallinson, in a review in the magazine Art in America, described Thibeault’s work as an “entropic thrill ride rendered seductive by lush, high-keyed color, shifting perspectives and virtuosic brushwork.”

Bohnak said he first noticed the intensity of color. “As I looked more, I was intrigued by the forms that seemed to emerge and hide again in the work.”

Nicole Nguyen is a Dateline intern.

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Marie Thibeault online: mariethibeault.com

You can see her work at the George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco: georgelawsongallery.com.

2 MORE TALKS

The Art Studio Lecture Series wraps up with:

May 6 — Illustrator Owen Smith (see Exhibitions below for information about his one-man show at the Nelson Gallery)

May 20 — Photographer Jim Dow (postponed from an earlier date)

Both talks begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Technocultural Studies Building, and both are free and open to the public.