Z. Vanessa Helder

Z. Vanessa Helder (1904 - 1968) was an American watercolor painter who gained national attention in the 1930s and 40s, mainly for her paintings of scenes in Eastern Washington. She painted with a bold, Precisionist style not commonly associated with watercolor, rendering landscapes, industrial scenes, and houses with a Magic Realist touch that gave them a forlorn, isolated quality, somewhat in the manner of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. She spent most of her career in the Pacific Northwest (later moving to California), but was popular in New York art galleries, was a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and, in 1943, was included in a major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

She continued painting and exhibiting after moving to Los Angeles with her husband, architect Jack Paterson, but her career was slowed by the post-war rise of Abstract Expressionism, and later by the health problems of both her and her husband. They died a few days apart, in 1968.

For many years Helder's work was considered out of vogue by critics, curators, and buyers, but the power of her work has gradually been rediscovered, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The Tacoma Art Museum held an exhibition of her work in 2013, and the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane has her twenty-two piece series relating to the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam - generally considered her masterwork - in its permanent collection.

Early life

Zama Vanessa Helder was born May 30, 1904, in the town of Lynden, near Bellingham, in Whatcom County, Washington. "Zama" (which she came to dislike) was the name of the ancient Carthaginian battle site where Hannibal was finally defeated by the Romans. Her father, Rynard, was a well-to-do businessman; her mother, Anna, was a music lover and at times an art teacher, who gave young Vanessa her first painting lessons. Mother and daughter were both interested in Theosophism and Spiritualism, which were unusual pursuits in conservative Lynden. She had a brother, R. Wright Helder. Vanessa became proficient in landscape painting with watercolor at an early age. She graduated from Whatcom High School and studied at the University of Washington before winning, in 1934, a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. There, she studied under well-known artists such as Frank DuMond, George Picken, and Robert Brackman.

Career

In New York, Helder, older and with a more honed style, quickly gained notice. She gained membership in both the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors and the American Watercolor Society, which led to inclusion in group shows at prominent galleries, and eventually representation by the Grant Studio, and later the Macbeth Gallery. Although she painted a variety of subjects in a variety of locations, her realist yet unearthly Northwest landscapes proved popular in New York, and she regularly travelled back to Washington to go on painting trips with friends such as Ebba Rapp and Blanche Losey, who were fellow members of the Women Painters of Washington association.

In 1937, Helder moved to Seattle to take up a WPA job offered by Bruce Inverarity, the Federal Arts Project director for Washington. This included painting murals at the state capitol in Olympia and at Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle (both now lost). She entered several paintings in the Northwest Annuals, and had a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. In 1939, at Inverarity's request, she began teaching classes in watercolor and lithography at the Spokane Art Center, working alongside avant-gardists such as Margaret Tomkins, Carl Morris, and Guy Anderson. As an established professional working in a more traditional style, she was somewhat out of place on the faculty, but was able to spend a great deal of time roaming about Eastern Washington, painting landscapes. It was in this period, from 1939 to 41, that she painted the Grand Coulee series, often thought of as her best work.