Liliana Thelander poses in her studio, located in the daylight basement of her Bristol home. Inspired by the opportunity to paint her daughter’s bedroom walls, Thelander has established herself as a fine artist. She is currently debating whether to continue focusing on her art career or move in another direction. (Sherwood Olin photo)
With her youngest son headed off to college in the fall, Liliana Thelander finds herself with a rare moment to think about her next move.
Over the last decade-plus, Thelander worked very hard to establish herself as a fine art painter. She is currently debating whether to fully recommit herself to her art career or move in a different direction entirely.
“I’m deciding if I want to go 100% back to art,” she said. “I was doing a lot of art earlier. You know, 2012, 2013 until like 2016, and I kind of slowed down. So I’m debating just doing that.”
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Liliana Thelander grew up in a middle class family and wanted to study marine biology, but her mother overruled her. Caracas was four hours from the ocean and it would be uncommon for a young Venezuelan woman to leave home to go to school, she said.
“Caracas has many universities, but it’s marine biology,” Thelander said. “You need to be by the ocean. So she said no, and she enrolled me in computer science 10 minutes from my house, so that’s what I did.”
After college Thelander got a job working in a bank. While she enjoyed some aspects of the position, many of her work days were spent in a windowless office.
Thinking about going back to school, Thelander took some English classes in Caracas only to realize how helpful English would be for writing computer code.
“If you know English, you understand what you’re writing,” she said. “In Spanish, you just memorize a command, many times without knowing exactly what you’re saying. Up until I learned English, I said ‘Oh, go to. Something, something means go to,’ but, in Spanish, it’s not ‘go to’ … My five years of study would have been much easier if I had known English.”
In 1994, when some friends of her mother offered her a place to stay with them in Virginia Beach, Va., Thelander leapt at the chance to move to America. That fall, she was enrolled in a community college studying English as a second language when she saw some young women playing baseball in a community sports complex near her home.
“I used to love baseball in Venezuela,” Thelander said. “I never played on a team, but I used to live in a building and all the kids would go downstairs and play baseball. We played all kinds of games, but baseball was my favorite.”
Stopping off to inquire if she could play proved to be a life-changing decision. A coach she met at the game introduced her to one of the players, Lola, who became a friend. Lola was married to a military man who was very good friends with Ed Thelander.
A Michigan native, Ed Thelander was a Navy SEAL, then not yet halfway through a 21-year military career.
Once Liliana and Ed met, events moved quickly. That December, he accompanied her home to Caracas to visit her family. After dinner one night, he asked her to marry him, and in Spanish, no less. She said she had no idea he was going to propose right then and there.
Liliana Thelander knew he could speak some Spanish, she said, but he honestly surprised her.
“It was very touching,” she said. “My family, of course, loved it.”
The couple married in a civil ceremony in January 1995 and repeated their vows with a more traditional wedding ceremony for friends and family that September.
“We have two anniversaries,” Thelander said, smiling.
Not long afterward, Thelander obtained a sales position for Coastal Training Technologies Corp., a company that produced and sold employee training videos. She loved the job, she said, but decided to step down when she became pregnant with the couple’s first child, Thomas “Tommy” Thelander.
Their daughter, Sandra, followed in 2002. That same year, Ed Thelander returned home from what would be his final foreign deployment, a six-month posting in Spain. The family bought some land in Virginia Beach and built a house, with Ed Thelander doing most of the work himself.
They might have stayed in Virginia, but in 2006, Ed Thelander received orders for another posting and was offered the choice of Hawaii or Maine. The family chose Maine, figuring it would be better for the kids. With her husband looking to retire from active duty in 2009, Maine was not expected to be a long-term destination, Liliana Thelander said.
“We came here just for the three years, but we loved it,” she said, “Loved it. We sold our house (in Virginia). We rented it for the three years, and, halfway through those three years, we said, ‘We’re going to sell the house. We’re staying here.’”
Following Ed Thelander’s retirement, the family moved to Wiscasset, ultimately purchasing a home in Alna in 2011, attracted by Alna’s school choice option. They moved to their current home in Bristol after 2015.
Liliana Thelander was already a skilled stained glass artist when her daughter asked her to paint her bedroom walls. At the time, painting was a completely new process for her.
Painting in oils and sometimes acrylics, Liliana Thelander describes her style as “contemporary realism.” Her work has been noted for its eye for detail and use of light and color. (Sherwood Olin photo)
“I knew how to draw a little bit, not much,” Thelander said. “Drawing for stained glass is different than actually painting or drawing.”
Armed with an idea, Thelander checked out a number of library books on animals and set to work painting her daughter’s bedroom. The results were inspiring enough for her to enroll in an adult education drawing class in Bath, she said, and that experience gave her the courage to pursue painting seriously.
“I felt that I never dedicated to painting as a job,” Thelander said. “It was more like as a hobby, really. It was selling well, but I needed more hours if I wanted to make it a career or an income.”
Thelander has since gone on to show at numerous galleries, including the Summer Island Studio in Brunswick, the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, River Arts in Damariscotta, and many others. She is a member of the Pemaquid Group of Artists and the Oil Painters of America.
Locally, she studied with local artist Barbara Applegate. Together with Applegate and two other painters, Thelander painted at Applegate’s Bristol Mills studio on Mondays for years. Later, Thelander hosted the weekly painting sessions after her family moved to Bristol.
The regular get-togethers were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and have not resumed since, Thelander said.
Stylistically, Thelander favors what she calls “contemporary realism.” She said she has noticed some art teachers tend to push students toward a particular direction, usually abstract art or impressionism, and she prefers neither, although she did devote six months to abstract painting. Her painting improved as a result, she said, but the genre is not for her.
“It’s a whole totally different way to think,” she said. “When you do a realistic painting, you know when you’re done. When you’re doing an abstract, how do you know you’re done? I had that problem. I mean, it’s an abstract so I don’t know. Six months of it was not enough for me to learn, but it was fun. It was free. You don’t have to think of details. You just apply color and shapes, and that was fun.”
Ironically, Thelander never thought of herself as an artist, although both her brother and her mother have an artistic streak.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Thelander to take an interest in local politics. She said she felt motivated to get involved because she felt the United States was following the same path Venezuela did in the 1990s when voters first elevated Hugo Chavez to presidency.
Ed Thelander felt so strongly about the state of the country that as a first time candidate in 2022, he ran for Maine’s 1st District Congressional seat, challenging seven-time incumbent Chellie Pingree.
Liliana Thelander said she enjoyed campaigning, but admitted it was challenging for the family. The kids couldn’t escape notice in school, she said, she personally has lost friends over political differences.
“I’m hoping things are going to level off,” she said. “I think people need to be patient and wait to see if what (President Donald Trump) is doing is working. If it’s not going to work in four years, we’ll elect another just like what happened four years ago, but what if what he’s doing works?”
While she was very active politically through the 2024 presidential election and still serves as vice chair of the Lincoln County Republican Committee, Thelander said she hopes to take a step back in the future.
Having said that, she said she knows she can’t go back to her life as it was before taking part in political activism.
“I feel that I cannot go back and put my head in the sand like in the past,” she said. “I feel that’s how a lot of people are right now, but that’s how I feel I was before. You just worry about your things, but we got to the point that I cannot just worry about my things.”
In the immediate future, Thelander said she is looking forward to getting her garden started.
An avid tennis player, she continues to rehabilitate her knee from a significant injury to her ACL sustained in a tennis tournament in Bangor in 2023.
The injury is so significant, Thelander has had to resort to pickleball, going to the “dark side,” she said, as some dedicated tennis players call it.
Thelander took up tennis just before the family moved to Maine in 2006 and fell in love with the game. Sandra played on Lincoln Academy championship tennis teams in 2018 and 2019 and her youngest child, Peter, plays like a natural, his proud mother said.
“Peter, he hasn’t had many lessons, but he plays great, you know, the strokes, it looks like a professional tennis player,” Thelander said. “I said that my tennis is like my English, with an accent. I play tennis with an accent … but it works. It goes over and gets points.”
To view Thelander’s artwork, go to lilianathelander.com.
(Do you have a suggestion for a “Characters of the County” subject? Email info@lcnme.com with the subject line “Characters of the County” with the name and contact information of your nominee.)
