Winter Berries 2 Nature Art Acrylic Painting

About Fine Art For Small Spaces

Flowers have character, and no two are ever alike! Nouveau posters inspired me to add India Pen and Ink to my watercolor flower paintings, giving them a stylized look. Add visual drama to your space with a flower that never fades.

The watercolors and acrylic paintings of Helena Kuttner-Giasson capture nature’s most intimate and dramatic moments. She invites the viewer to share her love of the natural world and recapture moments lost to the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
As a child, Giasson found her voice through art. The daughter of Soviet Block refugees, she found her drawings of horses, birds, and flowers an effective cultural bridge while she grappled with learning the English Language.

Throughout her early childhood years, various teachers encouraged her to continue drawing, and her parents enrolled her in private oil painting lessons under the tutelage of Michda, a Ukrainian painter whose studio was in her hometown.
She studied figure drawing by copying Mucha’s graphic posters and fell in love with the bold black ink work juxtaposed against the human form and various floral motifs.

This preparation enabled her to enter the University of Michigan School of Art, now known as the Penny Stamps School of Art, where she learned skills in observation and interpretation of the world in various art media.

After leaving the university, Giasson parted ways with her art for several years before translating her knowledge of Art Nouveau and Art Deco to create designs on glass and mirrors for various companies. When imported products undercut the industry, Giasson had to set her art aside and work in multiple offices as a clerk to support herself and her family.

A six-month leave enabled her to rediscover her desire to create images on paper and canvas. Giasson states, “Those were my life’s two most difficult decades. For one year, I managed to paint only a single watercolor. Caught up in the daily treadmill of survival, I slowly began to realize that the longer I was out of the element of the natural world and away from my art practice, the more discouraged I had become.”

As a child, Giasson recalls her parent’s devoted love of the natural world and a road trip across the great American West, where she encountered images of this great country’s vast beauty and expanse. When her leave from office work took place, she began painting and drawing feverishly, and all the Western images unfolded from her memories, spontaneously created with a palette knife and swirls of acrylic paint. She also took up a discipline to draw from life and retrained her eye after decades of neglect.

In 2013, an injury limited her ability to maintain employment, and with her husband’s blessing, she endeavored to earn a living from her work.
Over these last few years, her childhood influences have become a strong presence in her work. “I cannot feel a piece is truly finished unless it has the graphic lines incorporated into it,” she says of her florals. “However, my recent floral series celebrates the purity of watercolor media.”
Giasson works in two styles: abstracted landscapes primarily in acrylic and tightly rendered and composed florals in acrylic and watercolor. She feels both are necessary to maintain creative balance and artistic challenge. “A stint of creating tightly composed florals is relieved by letting the muse guide my palette and my hand with the landscapes deep within my mind.”

Artists Statement

I work in two contrasting methods and styles, which give me a sense of artistic balance and reflect both the chaos and order in nature, my predominant subject matter. My intuitive method begins with a basic color palette, which is added to instinctively as the piece develops.
 
In this method, I draw upon memories of experiences in the natural world, such as trips out West or walks on one of Michigan’s lakeshores. I channel feelings of movement and color, using acrylic with a brush and a palette knife to model the scene. This leads to either highly abstract works or pieces where discernible landscape structures become apparent, such as a hill, a mountain, a cliff, or a grouping of vegetation.
 
When working intuitively with watercolors, I begin painting after observing my subject, such as clouds or birds, for numerous hours. As I work, images present themselves. As the story unfolds, I add and delete pigments at great length to form an image and adjust my palette instinctively.
 
My second method involves a great deal of contemplation and planning. It begins with a snapshot of an intimate moment experienced outdoors. A blossom, cloudscape, or waterline is captured as a photo, and critical elements are extracted to create the painting. I play around with the composition, create palette swatches and rough sketches, and ultimately transfer the sketch to paper or canvas in preparation for painting.
 
In both methods, I allow the pigments to mingle or overlap freely, creating their language of color. After they dry, I apply black ink to further motion in broad undulating strokes or develop a form with extensive stippling. The finished piece suggests the reference material but rarely resembles it.

The artwork is completed when I feel it reaches the level of visual emotion it needs to tell a story that others can enjoy.

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