Mary Helsaple A Work in Nature
By Natasha Heinz, Photos by Daulton Venglar
Mary Helsaple's studio is surrounded by red rocks. Shades of orange, grayish green and brown encircle the house.
The inside, however, is completely different. Huge watercolor paintings with splashes of bright red and yellow hang on almost every wall, depicting environments that could never be found around Sedona: Colorful tropical forests, which she has seen during numerous travels throughout the Americas.
A nature lover, Helsaple traveled alongside partner Neal Williams to Florida to see pelicans, to Yucatan to see Flamingos, to southeastern Peru and western Brazil to see the Pantanal and the Amazon regions.
What were originally birdwatching trips - an interest the couple shared early on, with Helsaple pointing out that they went birdwatching on their first-ever date - became more than just tourism and they started filming for what ended up becoming nature documentaries for television networks.
Some of them, such as 1994's "Spirits of the Rainforest," earned them Emmy Awards. While they have six Emmys in total, only one of them is displayed in the couple's living room in Sedona.
Raised in California, Helsaple earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts before moving to Colorado Springs, Colo., where she co-owned a manufacturing company with Neal Williams.
Helsaple pointed out that she and Williams "are very busy people," so, after 35 years of juggling art, producing movies and managing a company, they were ready for a change.
"We got kind of tired of that and decided that we needed to do something else. I wanted to focus more on my art and my painting, so we found Sedona and fell in love with it. And it was so much warmer than Colorado," she said, ending the sentence with a laugh. "We just really fell in love with the red rocks and also just how simple life was here.
MARY HELSAPLE is a naturalist painter, whose works feature animals and their environments in vivid color and sharp detail. Her list of accomplishments runs long and includes four National Television Emmy awards for nature documentaries. Her paintings can easily take over 100 hours to complete, depending on the level of detail.
You know, Sedona really is an island, a very small town in a lot of regards and we decided that we would probably work from our home."
The places Helsaple saw during her trips were still fresh in her mind and, with the help of journals she took with her everywhere and in which she drew sketches, she continued working on watercolor paintings inspired by tropical themes.
Most of them feature the many shades of green and brown from the trees, colorful macaws, monkeys and a lot of ants. The importance of showing the critters that live in the forest is tied to not only depicting the landscape but the full environment - the plants, animals and people who share the same space.
"I'm what you call a narrative painter. For me, it's about the idea and the story that it tells. Everything I put into the composition usually is symbolic in some way," she explained. "I think every painting has an idea that is a jumping off point for whoever looks at it, and obviously every person who looks at it brings their agenda to the painting, as well. So, it may trigger something very different for you than it triggers for me."
Inescapably, Sedona has also become an inspiration for Helsaple, and she doesn't think the desert is that different from the other places she's been to, at least not where her work is concerned.
"What I learned when I was doing those [rainforest] paintings is all the diversity and all the wealth is in the biosphere, is in the habitat, whereas here is very much like that as well," she continued. "If you look at the land here in Sedona, every tree creates its own habitat. In other words, there will be bare ground between certain habitats of trees.
"The thing that I discovered when I first moved here is you rarely see just one plant in one location; usually it's a community of the same plants in 30 lifestyles of Sedona the same location and they're interdependent.
"So, in a lot of ways, Sedona is a lot like the rainforest in that there's a lot of diversity and, what's important, it's interdependent.”
The focus on composition and on the narrative are also part of what makes them similar. Each of her paintings tell a story about how humans and nature connect.
From funny details, such as a climber wearing leggings with a pattern that copies ladybug colors, to images that show the impact humans have on the environment, Helsaple said she "wanted to create paintings that got people to think about what might be going on."
Even after 30 years as a watercolorist, Helsaple is still experimenting and learning about her medium. She explained she recently found out how spongy watercolor was, which led her to add 3-D features to her paintings.
"I got so excited because I started cutting it up and beveling it and twisting it, and it can really be a sculptural medium, so I decided I wanted to find a way in which to make that kind of static watercolor kind of vibrate and it really does," she said.
This interest in trying new things also led her to yet another new experience: Teaching. Since the start of 2019, she has been conducting classes at Yavapai College. What started as a six-week introductory course has now expanded, and Helsaple created a watercolor journaling class, sharing her love with students.
"It gives me such excitement to see that light bulb go off for other people. And I think I realized I do like teaching and I think that I can see that these individuals are benefiting from the lessons that I am sharing with them," she said. "It's just a really wonderful way and everybody is just having such a great time."
"Everybody, even when they're toddlers, learns watercolor. But [it] is so different when you have the right supplies and I think most people get frustrated at watercolor because they never have the right brush, they use horrible paper .... But real watercolor, it is magical," she continued.
Teaching has also given her the chance to share lessons learned during her life and inspire students to go express themselves.
"Oftentimes, I think people forget it's more than just trying to copy a photograph," she said. "I had a painting mentor and she said to me, 'you know, sometimes you have to write yourself a postcard' and keep that when you're first starting painting. Write a sentence about it or just jot down some words because when you look at a landscape and you go 'Oh, I want to paint that,' that's your burst of inspiration. And anyone who creates has to hold on to that until they get to the very end."
"When you put [the painting] on the wall, you hope that, when you look at it, that you'll still feel the same way about it," she continued. "I think that it's a process, it's a way for us to become familiar with the things that are important to us: Creating art is a way we learn about how we relate to our environment and that environment could be our community or it can be our family, so I think the exercise of creating art is something that is really unique to humans."
Although life took her many different paths - from exhibiting to teaching, from making art to owning a company, from bird watching to producing documentaries - the one thing that remained constant was the reason she makes art.
"The more I discover about a bird or something - sometimes I just look at them and I get such a charge, I just have to paint them because I want to create this idea that I have in my head," she explained, when asked about still what excites her about creating art.
She crosses the room to show something fairly different from her wall-sized watercolor paintings.
A print no larger than an A 4 sheet of paper. Helsaple's original concentration was not in painting - that is actually something she fell in love with by talking to her mother-in-law, a watercolorist - but printmaking.
She changed mediums pretty quickly after graduation and keeps only one print, which she said was done just before getting her degree. It depicts a car accident but focuses on how the animals from the side of the road relate to it.
Helsaple said she found the image a few years ago and was impressed how similar it was to her watercolor work, asking the same question: How do humans affect wildlife?
"That's when I had the epiphany that I was in the right path - that was my question," Helsaple concluded.
MARY HELSAPLE teaches her students a watercolor technique at her weekly class at Yavapai College's Sedona Center.
