PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 99 a winged visitor during the Le Papillon project. “We had a juvenile red-tailed hawk who would just come and land on our swing stage and sit with us while we painted.” On another memorable occasion, “a Cooper’s Hawk dropped a pigeon carcass—like PLOP—it just landed right next to us!” Thayer too feels the pull of nature, particularly through the majestic power of the ocean. As a surfer, he describes “getting out into that frontier, where it’s energy and it’s chaos, but it’s also… it’s ordered chaos.” It was a major deciding factor in attending UC Santa Cruz. “The wildness of it is what attracts me. I kind NATURE NURTURE Jane’s reverence for the outdoors started young. “I wanted to know and understand this world that isn’t human-made,” she shares. Recalling the chopping down of a favorite tree in her childhood backyard—one she’d shimmied up often to nestle in a favorite nook—Jane gets mistyeyed. “It really sits with me in a visceral way, the loss of this massive, epic willow tree.” Speaking of humans and their inseparability from the wild world… “We have these beautiful nature encounters on almost every single one of our outdoor projects,” Jane laughs. She launches into a story about of have an anti-authoritarian streak,” Thayer admits, adding that he has always pressed back against “rigid structures and contrivances of humans.” Nature seems to love Thayer right back. He once dug up the ninth largest diamond discovered at Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park. (Mostly, Thayer says, people don’t find anything when they pay to dig, “and if they do, they find some little thing the size of a grain of rice with the clarity of a foggy San Francisco August day.”) WRITER MEETS PAINTER Befitting Jane’s butterfly murals, the painter’s own metamorphosis is quite the remarkable ABOVE: (right) Seafood Medley PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF INK DWELL / COURTESY OF LE MONDEUR
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