Mara Thygeson 

         “Simplify, simplify, our lives are frittered away by detail.”  --Thoreau 

Plein-air painting combines Mara Thygeson’s love of nature and watercolor. Exploring the wilderness has been part of her life since childhood. Flunking 6th grade fractions in public school, she transferred to Walden in Berkeley, a transformative year that introduced her to literary wildlife lovers Emily Bronte, John Muir and Thoreau. Her class of eight girls backpacked and camped in the Grand Canyon. More than 50 years later, Thygeson camps solo on Clear Lake with Lila, her husky-wolf, and paints landscapes.

Mara studied painting at U.C. Berkeley in ‘73 when Diebenkorn was a visiting professor. Due to the repression of abstract art being in vogue, she transferred to the Marxist criminology department for creative freedom, and didn’t paint again until she was thirty-four. She studied plein-air watercolor at the U of O with Ralph Baker, and got a BFA in painting. A married, stay-at-home mom of four, combining art with motherhood, Mara took her young sons to rivers and lakes. While they played and caught crawdads, she painted nearby.

Since 2007 Mara’s work shifted through studying with Adam Grosowsky, Umberto Gonzalez and Erik Sandgren. Her watercolors have been exhibited in solo and group shows in venues and galleries in Bolinas, California, Eugene and Portland, Oregon.

Her passion for beauty and solitude solidifies in painting. Heavy pack on her back, she hikes for miles through forested mountains, rivers and lakes until a landscape compels her. She slips into the gap and inhales light through paint. A portal into another world, her eyes, hands and brushes become one with trees, sea and sky. Satori, a magical hush that erases worldly concerns, transformed into values, colors, soft and hard edges.

Mara left home at 16 and moved to Bolinas, California on the Pacific Ocean, a town of 2000, a jewel off the map of life. Her novel-memoir in-progress, The Land of Laughing Porpoises, is set there. Painting Bolinas land and seascapes is her life’s work. Almost every summer Mara and Lila spend two weeks doing plein-air in Bolinas. Her work includes watercolors from travels with her husband to Italy, Mexico and Kauai.