“I should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling.”  John Constable.

This exhibition celebrates a new body of work by British landscape painter Tyga Helme and her second solo show at Messums London. The work presented has all been produced between 2022 and 2023 in different locations across three countries – the UK, France, and India. A young painter who trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London before participating in Messums Emerging Talent programme, Helme is invested in explorations of the natural world viewed through close observation.

Helme infiltrates the hedgerows and undergrowth of her environment, discovering and depicting the narrative of these complex microcosms. She is captivated by the minutiae of detail, the juxtaposition of colour, a shift in weather, the subtlety of changing seasons in these miniature worlds which confront the senses. Her work signifies a quest for understanding and a desire to be surprised, to learn by engagement and by embracing chance encounters in the natural world. These are very contemporary concerns.

Seeking out busy and overwhelming subject matter in nature with all its mystery and wildness, she delves into these enigmatic environments, responding to sound, touch, texture, light, temperature, and smell – all of which combine to fundamentally capture the essential character and spirit of a place. For her, this can come from her ground-level viewpoint, peering through brambles and foliage as exemplified in this new series of works, or by vertiginously gazing up into the trees, disorientated by the shift in perspective as in the group of works exhibited at Messums in 2021 including Upwards into Mystery and Drinking from the Skies. Working outside, she returns to the same spots, to explore her subject again and again, to detect the subtlety of changes, to be informed by her memory, by past observations, and her personal attachment, but always to experience the unique character of that moment and thus for her vision to be perpetually refreshed. Through this, she is reminded that nature is forever active and in motion. With her mind awakened through the senses, she responds to these stimuli with an urgency in the work prompted by this constant state of flux.

Helme’s approach to painting is rooted in drawing. Focusing on the essential qualities of acute observation, she aims for the work to retain the same energy and immediacy of response as in drawing. The painterly marks are direct, almost calligraphic in their form. She comments, “Drawing has this ability to connect me to nature, to the sensations it offers, more than anything else. It’s like a meditation, trying to surrender as much as possible to what I’m looking at, with little agenda, allowing myself to be surprised, to see more.”

Like so many artists before her, Helme observes the natural world with awe, perceiving something vastly greater and more complex than can be fully comprehended. She comments, “I think I see it as a constant reminder that nothing can be fully understood and nothing can surpass nature, all we can really do is be in wonder.” In this way the work is about connecting and about being present. She describes:

“Drawing the minutiae can feel like an exploration of opposing ideas; of calm then chaos, of awkwardness then ease, of known and unknown. You think you understand what you are looking at one minute and then feel completely lost the next. This is what I always seem to look for when I start, for a feeling of being lost, I want to feel like I have no idea how to begin. I guess some writers have described it as the sublime in nature.”

Working in India, Helme found the lack of familiarity with her subject encouraged a deeper response in her senses, to virtually surrender to the sensations of colour, shape, and rhythm. Painting in this climate required an even faster pace as she found organic growth was taking place more swiftly, “in the south things are dying and growing so fast, there are no seasons and it felt like leaves and flowers could come and go in a matter of days, which gave me a sense of urgency that I would miss things or lose them.” Works in this series from India include, What’s felt in the wings, Flare up like flame and Underwings.

The most subtle moments in the natural world can rouse Helme’s imagination and fuel the work. It may be one colour adjacent to another, a shape, a shadow, a glimpse of an imminent seasonal shift. For her, these fine details offer an endless sense of wonder – a process whereby looking at less enables seeing more. Holding multiple elements together, Helme considers the reaction of one to another and their interdependence on each other. In India, for example, colour itself became a catalyst for new ideas:

India offered up colour surprises – there was this one shrub on the side of the road with a tiny flower, an extraordinary blue, almost turquoise. (You can see in What’s felt in the wings) It’s so rare to see a blue like that in nature, and it was so exciting the effect it had on everything around it. It is a constant fascination for me how colours change next to other colours. It was speaking to what’s around it, pulling some colours towards it and some further away, dulling some things, and brightening others. Matisse called colours forces and it really feels like that when I’m drawing or painting.

The series of ‘nettle’ paintings in the exhibition – They whisper still, Days won’t keep still and Tenderness surrounds you, together with the painting Violet blue in clover – were created in France while Helme was on a residency there in 2022. Despite the pastoral beauty of the area (Pays de Belves) Helme was drawn to finding the wilder, more secret patches of woodland, a further indication of her desire to connect to nature in its truest form.

There are echoes of the paintings of Pierre Bonnard in Helme’s interlacing of colour and form in her panel paintings of brambles and undergrowth with the careful structure and balance across the picture plane. In particular, they call to mind Bonnard’s paintings of his garden at Le Bosquet with their juxtaposed tones of warm and cool colours, and rich rhythmic patterning. In Helme’s work, as in Bonnard, the eye is encouraged to explore the space and gradually discover the details embedded in the image.

Helme references Nan Shepherd’s book ‘The Living Mountain’ among her sources of inspiration, a philosophical meditation on the Cairngorms where the depth of connection to the landscape between writer and subject matter could not be stronger. Helme’s desire to immerse herself in nature with all her senses attuned, and allow it to be her guide, echoes Shepherd’s lyrical testament to the mountains. Shepherd’s description of water in the mountain feels particularly pertinent to Helme’s sense of what it means to truly look and listen. Shepherd describes,

The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes – the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen notes at once.[1]

It is this ‘listening ear’ that one feels in Helme’s approach to work, the intensity found through heightened perception illustrated by her remark, “Feeling. The subject needs to be felt… and then anything goes.”

Helme’s working process reflects the ideas inherent in the work. She paints on small panel format which, on a practical level, allows for the work to be easily portable for painting en plein air but, more significantly, the approach permits the work to grow and unfold organically, offering a metaphor for nature itself. There are no ultimate edges to restrict the framework which enables the painting to have an immersive quality – the panels gradually building to create the whole. There is a depth and density to the work in her depiction of layers of foliage which recall Édouard Vuillard’s tapestry-like interiors with their integration of complex close-ranged colourations.

Representations of landscape in art, poetry and music can symbolise ideas of hope, refuge, beauty, intrigue, and healing. Helme’s meditative response to micro worlds quietly draws attention to the underlying structures in nature and the ecosystems on which we all depend. Her innate sensitivity for the environment reminds us of the value of looking, listening and respecting our natural world at a moment when it is being tested more than ever before.

[1] Nan Shepherd, ‘The Living Mountain’, The Grampian Quartet ed. Roderick Watson, (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1996) 20. Originally published by Aberdeen University Press, 1977.