Bridge to Sutter Buttes, Palette Knife Landscape Painting, Signed Mary A. Nation, Colusa, California, 2003

The Piece

The Sutter Buttes rise in lavender and violet beyond a bridge that cuts hard across the foreground, its warm earth tones pulling your eye straight into the open Sacramento Valley. Mary A. Nation built the whole scene with a palette knife: the clouds, the wetlands and the mountain forms are laid on in thick ridges of paint that catch the light, so the surface moves even when the picture is still. It's direct and confident, with the immediacy of a painting made outdoors in front of its subject, and at 12 by 16 inches it holds a wall well beyond its size.

History & Provenance

Signed lower left, and inscribed on the reverse with the artist's name, her Colusa, California address, the title, the date and the size. Mary A. Nation, who exhibits as Mary Ann Nation, took up painting after retiring from her first career, following a single workshop at the Mendocino Art Center. She paints plein air with a palette knife, in loose, impressionistic landscapes of the Sacramento Valley and the California and Oregon coasts, and has shown at the Edgewater Gallery in Fort Bragg and in Colusa, Marysville, Yuba City and Willows, including a month-long exhibition at the Sutter Theater Center for the Arts in 2023.

The subject is the landmark of her home ground. The Sutter Buttes, the remnants of a volcano active about 1.6 million years ago, rise almost 2,000 feet out of the flat valley floor and are often called the world's smallest mountain range. More on the artist is on our Mary A. Nation artist page.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a painting of a real place by a painter who lived beside it, and it gives a room the kind of specificity a generic landscape never can. The size makes it easy to place on a bookshelf, in a hallway or in a gallery wall grouping, and the texture and colour give it enough presence to hang on its own. For anyone with roots in Northern California, it's the Buttes exactly as you see them from the valley roads.

To care for it, keep it out of direct sun and away from heating vents, and dust gently with a soft, dry brush. The raised paint should never be wiped.