Z. Vanessa Helder

Z. Vanessa Helder (May 30, 1904 – May 1, 1968) was an American watercolor painter who gained national attention in the 1930s and 40s, mainly for her paintings of scenes in Eastern Washington. She painted subsequent to a bold, Precisionist style not commonly united with watercolor, rendering landscapes, industrial scenes, and houses once a Magic Realist lie alongside that gave them a forlorn, isolated quality, somewhat when Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. She spent most of her career in the Pacific Northwest (later touching to California), but was popular in New York art galleries, was a advocate of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and, in 1943, was included in a major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

She continued painting and exhibiting after distressing to Los Angeles in the express of her husband, architect Jack Paterson, but her career was slowed by the post-war rise of Abstract Expressionism, and unconventional by the health problems of both her and her husband. They died a few days apart, in 1968.

For many years Helder's show was out of vogue and largely forgotten by the public, but the faculty of her art has gradually been rediscovered, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The Tacoma Art Museum held an exhibition of her con in 2013, and the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane has her twenty-two fragment series relating to the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam – generally considered her masterwork – in its permanent collection.