Mary A. Nation is a landscape painter from Colusa, California, in the heart of the Sacramento Valley. Exhibited under the name Mary Ann Nation, she came to painting after retiring from her first career, and has spent more than two decades painting the valley, the Sutter Buttes and the coasts of California and Oregon outdoors, on location, with a palette knife.

Painting has become for me a way to capture nature as I see it and thus to be able to share its beauty with others.
Mary Ann Nation, artist's statement, 2023

One Workshop Later

She did not set out to be a painter. Two friends insisted she give it a try, and after a single workshop at the Mendocino Art Center on the North Coast she was hooked. She describes herself as workshop trained, and she built her practice the way many plein air painters do, studying in turn with a series of working artists: Bob Burridge, Hope Stevenson, Erin Dertner, Sandy Delehanty, Jeff Leedy, Caroline Ometz and Susan Sarback.

Painting with the Knife

Her landscapes and seascapes are loose and impressionistic, and nearly all of them are painted plein air, in front of the subject. She works with water-mixable oils and a palette knife rather than a brush, so the paint goes down thick and stays there: clouds, water and hillsides are built in ridges of colour that catch the light on the surface of the panel. Her subjects run from the Mendocino and Oregon coasts to the open farmland and wetlands of the Sacramento Valley, and on south to Southern California.

The Sutter Buttes

For a painter in Colusa, the Sutter Buttes are always on the horizon. The remnants of a volcano active about 1.6 to 1.4 million years ago, they rise almost 2,000 feet straight out of the flat valley floor, and they are often called the world's smallest mountain range. The Maidu knew them as Histum Yani, the middle mountains of the valley. Nearly all of the range is private land, so most people know the Buttes the way Nation paints them: from the valley roads, rising beyond a bridge, a levee or a field.

Exhibitions

Nation has shown her work for several years at the Edgewater Gallery in Fort Bragg, and locally in Colusa, Marysville, Yuba City and Willows. In June 2023 Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture gave her a month-long exhibition in the Theater Gallery of the Sutter Theater Center for the Arts in Yuba City.

A Painter's Record

c. 2000 Begins painting after retiring from her first career, following a workshop at the Mendocino Art Center.
2003 Paints Bridge to Sutter Buttes in Colusa, dated and inscribed on the reverse.
2023 Solo exhibition, Theater Gallery, Sutter Theater Center for the Arts, Yuba City, June.

Inquire About Available Works

Works by Mary A. Nation come to the Eclection one at a time. View Bridge to Sutter Buttes, or Request a Private Viewing at the Morris building on East Fourth Street.

Sources

“Mary Ann Nation featured at Sutter Theater Center gallery,” Appeal-Democrat, Marysville, June 2023.
NASA Earth Observatory, “Sutter Buttes, California.”
Sutter Buttes Regional Land Trust, history of the Middle Mountain Foundation.
Inscription on the reverse of Bridge to Sutter Buttes, 2003.