Seeking Source

These paintings are a boiling down of nature to its simplest form, an abstract way to make sense of what the artist sees, including the colors, architecture, sunsets, and nature of Dallas, Brazil, Chicago and Arizona.

There is an ongoing dialogue in this work between the deliberate and the intuitive. The process of creating these works is very methodical. The large paintings begin with marking the canvases in intervals using the Fibonacci sequence. In some of the completed paintings, these marks are allowed to remain visible. The colors for the paintings are mixed in advance in an intuitive way and applied so that they are both smooth and retain the feeling of a brushed surface. In their color structure, these paintings connect with the work of Joseph Albers, Andre Cadere and Mark Rothko

Within the straight-line paintings, groupings of related works have emerged. First there were a series of paintings with vertical stripes of varying widths in one or two colors. A recent group of paintings have a grid of painted lines, partially obscured by washy fields of color. On top are painted a series of horizontal lines, creating a feeling of layered space. Helm’s ongoing fascination with beauty as it is manifested through use of light and color in her paintings is now finding light itself incorporated into the work. In all of the paintings, the intent is to bring joy, peace, love and beauty into the world as a means of bringing healing to the viewer.