Timshel Matheny: A Sacred Place
Timshel Matheny is a painter and musician based on the Central Coast of California. After studying literature and painting at UNC-Chapel Hill, she spent a decade touring internationally with the band Roman Candle while continuing to develop her visual art. Inspired by nature and travel, her paintings blend abstraction and landscape, often incorporating found materials from her daily canyon walks. Balancing music, art, and homeschooling her five children, Matheny’s work serves as a meditation on mystery and presence. She has exhibited in New York and California, creating paintings that offer quiet revelations and a deep connection to the natural world.
How did your creative journey begin?
I can’t remember a time when creativity wasn’t just part of who I was and how I functioned in the world. I was always drawing, singing, dancing, or imagining in some way or another. I always had a very “active” inner life, as quiet as I might have been on the outside. And from a pretty early age I remember understanding art to be a sense-making device whether it be through reading and story, good music, or even the fabulous, wacky world of The Muppets. I feel like the idea that art and artists had something very important to say that couldn’t be found anywhere else was a through-line of my childhood and I am very grateful to my parents for that perspective.
Your creative life spans both music and painting. How have these two disciplines influenced each other throughout your journey?
The two are absolutely related and yet very distinct. I really love the process of making an album or a song- the collaboration, the listening, the plundering into the unknown and following a thread of an idea or feeling and seeing where it goes and how it all fits together into some cohesive beauty in the end. The whole process is so wild and the fact that I get to do it with two other people that I trust and love is really electric and mysterious. It is also really hard and humbling- but in good ways that make you crazy and make you grow all at the same time. You kind of have to lose your mind and hope to gain it again on the other side. And then when you try and create that again in a live environment- that’s a whole different animal. It’s totally nerve-racking and so personal, so embarrassing and exhilarating all at the same time. I really love that about making music.
With painting it involves a lot of similar ways of stretching and groping- following an inkling or even a slant of light and then holding the hope that it is already complete on the other side- it's like driving through the woods at night with nothing but your parking lights on. But with painting I’m all by myself. And, in this way, it depends on a kind of interiority which can be delicate and a different kind of difficult. It is scary and exhilarating but it’s also tremendously rewarding in the way that giving attention and time to something that personal can be. But I think they are absolutely interdependent and in flux as practices that work off the same hinge. Like Joni Mitchell says, “It’s like crop-rotation”. And I know that rotation is very important for my own creative life.
Are there new mediums, themes, or collaborations you’re hoping to explore in your art or music?
Yes.
During the past year of watching this political hell and insanity and the horror of what is happening across the globe I have found myself feeling frozen by the overwhelm of it all. At some point, perhaps as a way of responding and staying open, I found myself deep diving into essays on ecology and various gardening principles. It sounds simple or maybe obtuse but reading about these topics felt like one of the only things keeping me from absolutely loosing my mind over the past year. Reading about buzz pollination or the principles of field fallowing somehow presented another, steady, hopeful voice, reminding me of the cyclical principles of life, death, regeneration.. that there is a deep, reciprocal reward in something that is nurtured and tended to, that the miraculous still might always present itself, that steps can be tiny but have grand directions, and that a long game still exists whether we acknowledge it or not.
As a result of this time spent reading, I have been currently working on a series that I call “Botanical Icons”. They are smaller works, built around a kind of mediative image distilled into simplified line and color, representing agricultural and ecological concepts. I’ve developed this practice of drawing out these concepts in colored pencil in my sketchbook and then rendering them on small scale linen panels and painting them into brightly, interiored wooden frames. They kind of vibrate off the wall in ways that all icons might and they allow a resting place for my minds-eye that I value.
I usually keep a side table in my studio with one of these going on amidst everything else and it has become its own little corner with its own kind of rhythm. Everything about them is quite different from the way I usually paint- they are slowly built up, one thin layer at a time, much like a colored pencil or water color drawing. I do a lot of “erasing” and restraining, trying to really focus the image into a compact but lucid image. It is very quiet and contemplative process and I love the contrast it brings to the rest of my studio practice right now.
Musically I feel like I’m just opening that room up again. My husband Skip has been making the most incredible solo record and I have loved walking alongside that process over the past year and a half. Its the first time he has written a record without us and so there is this feeling of a second world that gets to be created, which is cool. I’ve always loved the idea of a “made venue”- you know, creating a space to perform a record or body of songs that is unusual and made for the work, in a way. I also think there is a kind of liberty in performing new work in a space you have defined rather then entering the expected venues and doing the same old same ol’- even if that freedom is just for yourself in the way that you are new and the work is new and the use of the space is new and yet to be defined. Its important stuff when you are growing over time as any type of artists but especially as a performer, I think. And so we have been talking about me creating a body of work around some of the songs and how we could make something really lovely out of all of it together. That sounds really exciting to me.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
I am lucky enough to have a studio space directly connected to my house. There might be some stage later where I would benefit from going to another location but for now, with young children still at home, it allows me to have my work easily accessible throughout the many different periods of any given day. I teach my younger kids from home three days a week and so, on my two studio days, I try and to get to work in the studio as soon as possible. My life is very full and I am very aware that if I don’t make painting and my creative life as accessible as possible I will never find a window or dedicated space to cultivate it. I think plenty of mothers are familiar with how we learn to puzzle our time and identify our “windows”— I try hard to make it an absolute priority that ALL of my personal windows are as open as possible as much as possible. When my kids were really little this would mean that I might have notebooks open on tables around the house, colored pencils or books laid out in high spaces where little hands couldn’t disrupt them— it was really important for me almost to “teach myself” that my work was ongoing and woven into all of my life (whether it felt like that in those years or not).
This also helped me to establish the idea of “honoring the threads”, seeing every moment as open to something I might not have anticipated, and trusting that a conversation was going on continuously- a conversation that I was individually participating in. It’s funny that something as small as an open notebook on a countertop across the room could give me that encouragement but, even now, I know that it really did back then (and it still does!). It was the “yes” that I continually needed to remember myself and my work amidst the clamor of everything else. What grew from that small act was an abiding trust in my own work, something that I appeal to continuously in the studio today. I had to learn really quickly (almost out of desperation) what were the most essential necessities for me to be able to work- both in supplies and in preparation. That included everything from what supplies were portable or easily cleanable to knowing that I work best with time in reading and in the natural world and then doing my best to make that time a priority. Learning not to ideate on the ideal setting and circumstances has been such a gift. But knowing that tea, water, a good walk in any kind of weather after I drop my kids off at school, a handful of collected treasures I find along the trail, a reading journal, a color journal, a chair I can sit and look from, and a door I can close are my basics. Sounds like a lot and also not a lot at all. On my painting days I usually walk to transition from morning/family/domestic time. I am lucky enough to live in a really beautiful part of the world and I can find some way to get pretty deep into nature within footsteps of my front door. This also allows my eyes to adjust, my mind to get quiet, and my pulse to find a different rhythm. After my walk I make a cup of tea, maybe talk to one of my older sons or husband for a few minutes (they all work and school from home), and then head into the studio. If I have a painting I am working on it is usually set up on a table from the session before (I tidy and organize my paints and notes to close each day) and, if this is the case, I spend the first 20 minutes or so looking at what is happening in the painting at this point. These first minutes are really important to me because I am kind of remembering what I was doing and also realizing where else it might have gone since the last time I was with the piece. I usually organize my paints or pastels on the table and kind of potter and tidy while looking, distracting myself a bit so I can really see what is happening- that might not make sense but I find it true with painting- and it works this way with songwriting too- you have to pay attention and kind of look “askance” at the same time to really see and hear what has to happen next you know? I think it is similar to how people get their best ideas while brushing their teeth or sweeping the floor.. I find that to be very true. And so pottering is really important for me to look and at the same time stay out of my own way and see what I need to do next in or for the work. I usually work steadily until lunch when my husband asks me if I’m hungry and forces me to break for lunch. When he is out of town I survive on Trader Joes trail mix and forget to stop. But I’m grateful that he makes me step away, even for 20 minutes—my eyes adjust, my thoughts sift a little, some ink or paint dries.. its good for everybody:). And then I keep going, sometimes listening to music (often the same song over and over again) or a book on tape or somedays just quiet. I paint within ten minutes of having to leave to get my younger kids at school (every minute counts) and always leave ten minutes to tidy and put things in some sort of way that I can recognize where I was when I return. It’s really a sacred place for me and I don’t think I realize how much I depend on that room and that movement for my own regulation-psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. Even if I never got a finished painting from the studio, the time and way I get to be for that sliver of my week is absolutely essential.
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
There are so many details that have impacted my work as an artists, however there are two that stick out distinctly: First to mind is the shift of the pandemic. Despite having studied painting in college, during my life in music I had set my painting practice aside. Songwriting, touring, and then building and raising a family took up every last bit of my energy and time. And yet I held a lot of sadness and regret that was directly linked to my deep desire to be painting. Once the pandemic hit it was like a switch went off. I know a lot of people felt this in different ways but for me it felt like a door opened and I had to seize the opportunity. We had just moved into new space and the first thing I did was look at my family and claim the one extra space with a door for my studio. I hadn’t painted seriously for over a decade but suddenly the need to do so felt non-negotiable. It felt like a total act of self-preservation. It also felt like, once I said “yes”, I was crossing a threshold- one that I walked over with fervor and intense dedication. And I haven’t looked back. Second was my involvement in The Canopy Program. After painting again for two years I heard about the Canopy Program. I knew that what I wanted and needed next was community, structure, mentorship, and teaching. When I saw that Kimia Ferdowsi Kline (an artist I had loved and admired for years) was leading a cohort I walked into my kitchen and burst into tears telling my family “I have to do this.This is next.” I don’t know why it made me cry it was just that I felt so certain and excited by knowing. I spent a year doing the program and it absolutely changed my life as an artist personally, professionally, and in the studio. What I thought was one open door before- through The Canopy Program- then became a thousand open windows in a large beautiful house full of teaching, community, professional practice, materials and method education, critique, encouragement, and inspiration.
How has social media impacted your work?
Like everyone, my relationship with social media is complicated. It always involves a personal balance of using it as a tool and not as a distraction. However, I am very grateful for the community that social media has opened doors for and encouraged within the art world. Just the accessibility of being able to virtually visit galleries, get to know new artists, curators, and collectors, and MOST importantly connect with other artists in a way that is direct, intentional, and communal is truly a game changer. Life in the studio, especially if you are not in a city, can be incredibly isolating. And yet, because of social media, I am able to connect, collaborate, and participate in ways that I feel nourish and grow my career and practice while at the same time allowing me to step away when I need to and nurture my own world of work in a place and environment of my own choosing. This type of freedom is such a gift.
You’ve mentioned incorporating found elements like wood, stones, and sand into your paintings. How do these materials contribute to the story or emotion of a piece?
I feel like my relationship to the visual world is very tactile. Some of my earliest memories I have of beauty are of scooping handfuls of rocks into my palms from the riverbeds in Oregon and watching the dazzle of how they reflected light and color underwater. When I am in the studio I’m often trying to recapture some way that a natural tone or saturation was perceived in the wild during one of my walks or even in the light across the cheek of one of my children. It’s always a color and the way it was alongside of or reflecting across something else. And so I am really drawn to trying to incorporate some of the more tactile elements that I am drawn to in order to get closer to what I feel like I am seeing in the natural world. Recently I have even wondered about including punch needle or even painting on velvet in order to maybe get “closer” to the feeling of aliveness that I sense reaching out to me in my perceptions of color in the world around me. We’ll see.
Published on January 30, 2025