Pollination & Connection with Helen Klebesadel

Confluence Community
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May Artist of the Month | Helen Klebesadel

Helen Klebesadel is a Madison-based visual artist and educator best known for her environmental and surreal watercolors that push the traditional boundaries of scale, content, and technique. She has exhibited her watercolors nationally and internationally, including through the U.S. Arts in the Embassies Program.

Helen's work comes from years of observing the world and the relationships within it. Her paintings notice the native plants growing, the insects buzzing between flowers, and the ecosystems holding themselves together through thousands of small interactions. Her recent “Pollinator Effect” Series is about understanding small changes that have large and profound effects over time, with a focus on prairie ecosystems, and the plants and pollinators connected to them.

"My visual concerns run the gamut from careful study to poetic, symbolic and sometimes political representations of nature and human nature." - Helen Klebesadel

Lupine Prairie by Helen Klebesadel — **Lupine Prairie** by Helen Klebesadel

A Family of Artists

Helen grew up in rural Wisconsin in a family where creativity existed naturally alongside everyday life. Her father farmed, painted, and worked with wood. Her mother crocheted, and her grandmother and great-grandmother were fiber artists who made quilts, lacework, clothing, and textiles by hand.

“I have identified as an artist since I was a child. I remember being taught how to draw with perspective by my father when I was around 8.” - Helen Klebesadel

That early connection to handmade work later shaped how she thought about art more broadly, especially the artists that often get overlooked. When she sought out an art career in 1971, as an 18 year old college student in a small private art college in Milwaukee, she was not taught by, or about, a single women artist, nor artist of color. She dropped out her sophomore year, and spent the next decade determining her own path as an artist before returning to university as a 28-year-old freshman.

Helen is primarily known for her work in watercolor, which she applies to paper, canvas, and board. Although she painted in oils and acrylics during her youth, it was a college-level watercolor class in her thirties that reignited her passion for the medium. She initially approached watercolor with reluctance, having been taught that it was a lesser form of art. However, she soon fell in love with its luminosity and environmentally friendly qualities. After 35 years of working with watercolors she still finds endless inspiration within the medium.

I love watercolors for their luminosity, and they are environmentally safe and non-toxic. I have been working in watercolors for 35 years now and I am still not bored…"- Helen Klebesadel

High Summer Prairie III by Helen Klebesadel

Observation as Artistic Process

Helen describes making art as both a creative and critical thinking process, a way of examining not only her own experiences, but the larger social, political, and cultural patterns surrounding them. Over time, environmental concerns, feminism, and human relationships to nature have become recurring themes throughout her work.

Her creative process moves between structure and openness, careful intention, and allowing the material itself to guide what happens next. Some works begin with a specific theme or question she wants to explore, while others emerge more organically through experimentation with watercolor, texture, movement, and chance. Over time, those approaches have started to merge together, allowing planned compositions to hold room for surprise.

Her recent environmental works often begin with research and observation, studying native plants, pollinators, and the ecological relationships surrounding them. From there, she builds compositions through layered drawing, masking techniques, and watercolor processes that create unexpected textures and forms within the paintings. There is precision in the work, but also flexibility, a willingness to let the medium do things she does not fully predict.

Images drawn from memory, research, and lived experience overlap as the work develops. Sometimes writing accompanies the paintings as another way of processing what the work reveals. That relationship between observation and reflection is especially visible throughout her Pollinator Effect series. Helen has spent years researching native ecosystems, prairie restoration, and the environmental impact of habitat loss before translating those concerns into watercolor.

Her work reflects the beauty and urgency of tallgrass prairies in the United States, that have now been reduced to only a fraction of their original range, making them one of the rarest ecosystems in the world. Rather than approaching that reality through fear, her paintings focus on reconnecting people with a sense of care and relationship to the natural world.

“With these paintings I am working to help reconnect my audience with a love of the beauty of our natural world… because we will work to protect what we love.” - Helen Klebesadel

Milkweed Prairie by Helen Klebesadel — **Milkweed Prairie** by Helen Klebesadel

Community & Connection

While Helen's work often begins in observation and personal reflection, community has remained an important part of her creative life for decades. Throughout her career she has participated in artist-run organizations, feminist art spaces, academic communities, and collaborative projects that create space for artists to support one another, especially those who historically found themselves excluded from traditional art spaces.

That sense of connection became especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Helen noticed how isolated many artists and creatives had become. In response, she created the online “Cabin Fever Creative Community,” a virtual space where people could share artwork, articles, creative projects, and encouragement during a period when galleries, studios, and public gathering spaces were shutting down. What started as a small gesture of connection grew into a large creative network that continues today. Artists, nurses, students, hobbyists, educators, and first-time creatives all found themselves sharing space together through art. Some came to share professional work, while others simply needed somewhere to reconnect with creativity during uncertain times.

That same mindset carries through her collaborative projects as well, through environmental justice work, feminist art collaborations, mentorship, and teaching, Helen approaches creativity as something that grows through exchange and participation rather than isolation. Her work consistently returns to relationships, between people, ecosystems, histories, and communities. For Helen, art is part of how people process experience, build understanding, challenge assumptions, and imagine different ways of relating to one another and the planet.

Reflections

Throughout Helen's paintings, pollinators become more than visual subjects, they represent interdependence, movement, care, and survival. The native plants, prairie systems, insects, birds, and environmental cycles she paints all exist through connection to one another.

This month we focused on the relationship between Pollinators and Planet, and Helen’s work offered a way of looking more closely at natural systems of connection. Not only the environmental systems that sustain life, but the human ones as well, the ways people share knowledge, build community, pass down creativity, and care for the places they inhabit. Her paintings hold beauty and concern at the same time, and invite people to notice the world around them.