Nature and history, the seen and the imagined, have inspired artist Mae Wygant since childhood. Few artists can render the nuances of a summer garden or the sweep of cliffs to the sea who can also evoke the grace and charm of Victorian life a century ago, as she can. Working in a variety of media from watercolors, oils and acrylics to pastels, inks and charcoal, she continually seeks to share her own full-of-wonder perceptions of the world.

Classes at the Erie, Pennsylvania Playhouse as a child began Mae's art training. From the time she could hold a brush she spent countless hours at the dock in Erie with her drawing board and a fishing box full of paints. Walking from the Playhouse to the waterfront to draw and paint with class members (both adults and children) was a marvelous time...the area was very different in 1947! Shade trees, old romantic boathouses and boats, dramatic grain elevators, people young and old fishing from piers and tourists meandering. By the age of ten she was studying with noted portrait, figure and landscape artist Joseph Plavcan, which led her to win Pittsburgh's Kaufman Gold Key Award while still a teenager. Her legacy in the area continues as she will have works on display at the Bayfront Gallery in Erie from May to October 2009.

After formal training at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she won six prestigious Concours Awards, she continued to develop her talents with private and university courses, painting long into the night while her two daughters were growing up.

Her husband's career brought the Wygants to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lived for 31 years. During this time, Mae taught art to children and adults at the Marinwood Community Center, in public schools through the San Raphael Council of Music & Arts Invited Artists Program and in her studio. She also received many commissions and her works were juried into many shows, including the San Francisco Art Festival and the Zellerbach Show in San Francisco, where they consistently won awards; she was also juried into the Society of Western Artists and was an artist member of the National League of American Pen Women and received the honor of having two works accepted into the Chautauqua National Exhibition of American Art. Meanwhile her miniatures on wood sold briskly at Marin County gift shops.

Her life took a new turn in the 1970's when she founded and directed LITA (Love Is The Answer), an innovative program matching volunteers with convalescent home residents on a on-to-one basis. For her work with LITA and her accomplishments as an artist, she was a charter inductee to the Marin County Womens Hall of Fame. After passing the torch to a new director, she spent several years refocusing on her art. Yet she has never stopped painting, culling subjects from her own lush gardens to the grandeur of Big Sur to the realms of her own imagination.

Nature has always been her paramount inspiration. Every time you walk into a garden, it's different, she says, from moment to moment. At first that's intimidating, but then you're freed to feel the amazing wonder of it all. You should experience the moment, she stresses. If that happens, and you can quietly observe and see and feel, then you can go back to the studio later and finish the work.

Wygant also believes in communicating these feelings. The greatest gift a painter has is the ability to see in more depth than others. The immediacy of someone seeing my work and saying, Yes, I see, in the way that I see it, is wonderful. And to move someone else to paint, or walk, in a garden or by the ocean, and be aware of that beauty is precious, even though it may be someone I'll never meet. I hope my paintings give people a sense of the world as a better place.

Wygant relies on meticulous draftsmanship as well as feeling to capture the line, color and form of her nature subjects, from vivid roses and stately irises to brawny oaks, cloud-heavy skies and restless seas. The same draftsmanship serves her imaginative art well, ranging from Victoriana to storybook scenes, all sprouting from her fertile imagination. A painting such as her Blueberry House, which portrays a mansion, lawns, dock and a score of people busy with their summer day, seems the product of a tireless observer in its faithful detail, yet it is entirely imagined. I feel as if I know those people, she says. I know what they're doing, having lemonade on the deck, playing lawn games. They're quite real to me.

Beauty is Wygant's primary motivation, but many of her recent works, some on a huge scale, also carry messages of faith, love and justice that reflect her own spiritual roots. As she often says, with deep conviction, Love Is The Answer.

Mae Wygant currently works at her studio in Jacksonville, Oregon. In 2006, Mae held a retrospective of her work entitled 70@70 here to celebrate her versatility and joy of painting. After decades of rendering florals, gardens, landscapes, imaginative Victoriana, figures, seascapes and architectural pieces, she is now compelled regularly to paint abstracts on large canvases. At any given time one can find works in progress in various genres and mediums set up on easels as she continues exploring the possibilities each has to offer.