SANTA BARBARA, CA.- Mary Conover is the subject of two exhibitions currently on display at UCSB, and is a central figure in a third. They are relevant to anyone interested in the power of art to explore contemporary issues of the natural environment and the human unconscious.

Her art explores the power of limitless light—the light of horizons over water or desert. Most of her painting is done in the West Indies or on the shore of Lake Michigan, but much of her working life is spent on her ranch in Colorado. Mountain Island Ranch is an organic cattle ranch that operates under a conservation easement and is a dedicated steward of a fragile landscape, one that is now under great stress due to climate change.

Her background as an artist has been influenced by her grandmother who was a student of the analyst Carl Jung, and was the founder of Bollingen Press, the organization dedicated to making Jung’s thought available to the English-speaking public. Then on the art side, Conover was also trained as a photographer and botanical illustrator.

Conover’s art unites these disparate threads—the visionary unconscious, the organic environment, and luminous transcendence—in paintings that celebrate the union of the tactile veracity of paint and the suggestion of rich fields of color. She is inspired by the work of the British artist J. M. W. Turner, and like him, hides an allegorical depth beneath luminescent surfaces.

The exhibition at the College of Creative Studies, Mary Conover: Seeking Wholeness explores her working process, and lays out how she negotiates her various working and living environments to synthesis them into her art. She offers a model to students to think about how to work in nature and with nature, respecting and working intensively with the natural environment while transmuting it with an artist’s vision. At Davidson Library, Conover’s exhibition Alchemy of Light makes specific reference to Jung’s interest in alchemy as a way of understanding the unconscious forces of transformation that drive us. The exhibition is accompanied with several classic books published by Bollingen, and biographical details about her grandmother, Mary Conover Mellon. Finally, Illuminated Imagination: The Art of C.G. Jung, at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, explores Jung’s entire artistic oeuvre within the context of his interest in world art. It ends with a section on Jung’s influence in America, with a painting by Conover. The painting was chosen particularly because Jung’s first landscape watercolors exhibit his overwhelming interest in transcendence: they are scenes of the sun, setting over meadows and mountains and gilding them with a golden light. Jung’s first love of the sublime character of sunlight finds a refined and generous expression in Conover’s art.