“Burned by the Fire We Make,” collaborative watercolor by Helen Klebesadel and Mary Kay Neumann
A couple of years ago Mary Kay Neumann saw hundreds of sunflower starfish in the West Coast tide pools she’s been visiting for two decades.
“So many that you had to step carefully around them, even on the rocks,” says Neumann, over a glass of red wine with her fellow artist-activist, Helen Klebesadel.
“This last time, I didn’t see even one starfish,” Neumann says, recounting a spring visit to the once-thriving habitat on Vancouver Island. “They are dying in the millions.”
“Like the bees and the passenger pigeons,” adds Klebesadel. “The loss of keystone species at the top of the food chain is one of the most threatening consequences when nature is falling out of balance. Things we love are disappearing.”
Neumann and Klebesadel have collaborated on an exhibit of watercolor paintings that is a life-affirming, luminous response to the catastrophe of climate change. “The Flowers Are Burning: Incandescent Watercolors” opened July 3 at the Overture Center’s Playhouse Gallery. The painters call their approach “a distilling” that uses beauty to inspire change.
The large-scale, color-saturated paintings in “The Flowers Are Burning” are teeming with detailed and softly blended and blurred flowers, photorealist birds, bees, fire and fields that glow at times like a candy-bright collage. The result is a dazzling and sumptuous display of masterful technique and draftsmanship.
The works are float-mounted under museum glass in natural cherry wood shadow boxes. The paintings are for sale, and the artists have pledged 10% of the profits to environmental activist organizations. The exhibit is built to travel, the artists say, and they are negotiating with other venues.
“We want people who see our work to think about what they love in nature that is also disappearing,” says Klebesadel. “To stop and pause and notice.”
David Nevala
“The Flowers Are Burning” is a collaborative exhibit by painters Helen Klebesadel (left) and Mary Kay Neumann.
Neumann and Klebesadel have just spent much of the day working with gallery staff on the lighting and other technical details of the exhibit. It’s been raining all afternoon, but inside Barriques, just off the Capitol Square, the mood is cozy and convivial.
Even though our conversation “ice breaker” is about the alarming global loss of biodiversity and its multiple causes, from acidification of the oceans to fossil fuel emissions and myriad forms of pollution, Klebesadel says that “hopefulness for change, not gloom and doom” is at the heart of the philosophy she shares with Neumann.
She cites her ethereal “Prairie Fire,” a dramatic dazzler in vibrant flowing yellows, reds and lapis lazuli-hard blues, as an example of this duality.
Helen Klebesadel
“Prairie Fire II” by Helen Klebesadel: “The fire, which can be frightening and destructive, is also restorative.”
“The fire, which can be frightening and destructive, is also restorative. We’re bringing a sense of purpose and of the possible to the table, too.”
Neumann underscores this with a favorite quote from the writer Charles Eisenstein: “The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible,” a sentiment representing the life-blood of their ambitious aims and fire-charged brushes.
“The Flowers Are Burning” consists of 15 paintings, individual works and some that Neumann and Klebesadel painted together. They are the result of two years of intense exploration of their natural, organic subjects and of the nature of their artistic collaboration. This is their first exhibit together.
Both Madison artists have painted and shown their work separately for well over a decade. In addition to continuing their solo works, they plan to build on their collaboration in the future. And they emphasize they want to show this exhibit as widely as possible, in the hopes of inspiring action.
Klebesadel, 62, also has paintings currently on exhibit at the Yahara River Gallery on Winnebago Street, in a new group show called “Dream.” For nearly 20 years she showed regularly at the Grace Chosy Gallery on Monroe Street, which closed in 2013 after 34 years.
Neumann, 60, had her very first solo exhibit around the time she met Klebesadel in 2005. Klebesadel taught (and still teaches, after 18 years) a weeklong watercolor course at Bjorklunden (Swedish for “birch grove of the lake”) on Lake Michigan in Door County, affiliated with Lawrence University, where she chaired the art department for 10 years.
Mary Kay Neumann
“Sending Out an S.O.S” from Mary Kay Neumann’s “Melting Seastar” series.
It was during that idyllic summertime arts workshop that the artists’ friendship was sparked.
“Mary Kay impressed me with her courage to break out of traditional forms with watercolor,” Klebesadel says. “She wanted to go in this free-flowing, expressive direction that struck me. Generally, if I like the art, I like the person.”
For Neumann, Klebesadel’s reputation preceded her. “Helen has helped and supported so many artists, and is so respected as a community builder, I just wanted to stay in touch with her,” she says. Klebesadel helped Neumann with her 2005 exhibit and has been a close colleague ever since. “She helped me build confidence in trusting my own eye and to think about the overall theme of the show and what I was trying to convey,” says Neumann.
The artists, both avid gardeners, now live four blocks from one another and have developed bonds with their families, circle of friends and even their pets.
Both artists have day jobs that they find integral to their beliefs and their art. Klebesadel currently serves as director of the Women and Gender Studies Consortium at the UW System and the Wisconsin Regional Art Program at UW Continuing Studies. “My art making is one of the ways I think about the issues I am concerned with and start to give those thoughts form in the larger world,” says Klebesadel. “My jobs allow me to help other people to do the same.” In addition to serving in those leadership positions, her popular watercolor workshops have taken her across the United States, up to Alaska and down to Texas.
Neumann is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma. She pioneered a woman-centered practice 27 years ago “when there was no other place doing that.” She says the challenges of working with vulnerable and wounded people have given her greater faith in the human spirit, which she expresses in her art. “The resilience of human beings is always inspiring to me,” she says. “Pain can be transformed.”
The artists say their professional partnership began during a point of difficulty in their respective approaches to their art. Each of them found themselves at an impasse, “stuck” on paintings that they weren’t sure how to complete. But as a result, a breakthrough occurred.
Though they had known one another since that meeting in Door County in 2005, they both felt shy about sharing difficult work — especially works in progress — with a painter working in the same medium. After overcoming that initial wariness, they found they shared a passion for justice and a deep feminist perspective (“Let’s get the F-word in there,” Klebesadel says wryly). They also found they could help each other grow as artists.
After exchanging, adding to and sometimes completing details in each other’s individual paintings, they struck on the idea of creating some purely collaborative works.
“We wanted to paint great big bright flowers with the vividness of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, with the same kind of emotional impact and visual power,” Neumann says, citing Vincent Van Gogh as one of her primary influences. She has studied and reread his voluminous letters for years. “I won’t say obsessively,” she says, laughing, “...but with something like that.”
Klebesadel says that choosing flowers as a key subject is also a conscious, feminist approach. Despite the renown of such exquisite flower painters as Van Gogh and Rembrandt (to name only two among hundreds of men), women who painted flowers were often dismissed as decorative dabblers, she says. Even the now-globally acclaimed works of Sun Prairie area-born artist Georgia O’Keefe, and her revolutionary bursting red poppies and blue-limned white jimson weeds, were initially dismissed by the stuffy guardians of the art world.
Neumann also cites the German expressionist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) as a major influence on her approach to color and form. Both artists name the Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945) as a beloved touchstone. It’s easy to see why. Carr produced swoon-worthy paintings in a stunning range of ecstatic colors, nature themes and emotionally resonant expressive compositions.
Despite a string of recent environmental disasters — from floods in Texas to drought in California — there are signs of hope, including Pope Francis’ stinging encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si.” With this plea he brings unprecedented moral pressure to bolster the scientific conclusions showing that human actions have consequences, large and small. It brings attention to the larger economic policy issues, such as the dominance of the fossil fuel industry, but also the choices individuals can make to reduce their carbon footprints.
Beginning in 2013, Neumann and Klebesadel began to devote their painting hours to this personal approach to the Big Problem, focusing on the impact on the natural world around us. The direct and positive approach befits these warm, funny, down-to-earth women. (“I’m a Wisconsin farm girl,” Klebesadel says. “I still go back to the farm, in the Driftless Area of Southwestern Wisconsin where I grew up.”)
The work soon began pouring out, both in solo paintings and collaborations. And given that both women were used to working alone, it was a surprisingly genial process: “It flowed,” Klebesadel says. “It’s a pleasure.”
When they collaborate, one starts a painting and the other adds or makes changes. Along the way, they discuss the process and product. Importantly, they grant each other veto power on all the collaborative paintings.
And what happens when they disagree, as happens in any joint creative enterprise?
“I’m a detail freak,” Klebesadel says to me, shooting a glance at Neumann.
“You have to trust each other,” Neumann says.
“We worked hard,” Neumann says. “Some of the paintings didn’t cut the mustard. But when it’s flowing the moments are so transcendent.”
Klebesadel adds: “Collaboration is a metaphor for what we all have to do if we’re going to save our world, and ourselves.”
The Flowers Are Burning: Incandescent Watercolors
Helen Klebesadel and Mary Kay Neumann
Playhouse Gallery, Overture Center for the Arts
July 3-Sept. 2, 2015
Reception: Sunday, July 12, 1-4 pm
Update: After Isthmus posted this story, the artists went live with their website, www.theflowersareburning.com, which includes information about climate change and activism.
