Kelsi Anderson takes landscape painting to a whole new level
See Anderson’s gigantic ecological art installations this Saturday, Nov. 4, at Green Valley Farm and Mill
Sebastopol artist Kelsi Anderson of Wild Earth Art likes working big—really, really big. Her newest canvas is a multi-acre field at Green Valley Farm, between Sebastopol and Forestville. On the field, she’s painted two huge figures, a human circumscribed within a giant circle and a snake that is hundreds of feet long. They’re so big, in fact, that it’s difficult to grasp them from ground-level. You need to have a plane or a drone’s eye view to get the full effect.
Sometime she paints on hillsides, but continually clambering up and down a hill as she works is exhausting, so for now, she’s happy to be working on level ground.
Anderson, who was raised in Marin and Sonoma counties, studied art at NYU, but even in the confines of that urban environment, her art was often about connecting people to the natural world. It’s a theme she continued once she returned to Sonoma County.
“I've always been an artist and a painter and also a gardener, so constantly exploring ways to work with the Earth, be in my body and my hands and painting and having that visual mindset of things. So it's been a combination of a lot of different paths over the last 10 to 15 years.”
Anderson uses natural pigments, which she grinds and mixes herself—iron oxide, ochre, calcium carbonate. She mixes them with a bit of kaolin clay and sprays them onto the grass and dirt, using a professional paint sprayer, like the ones house painters use.
“After I came back from New York, I ended up farming for a few years and actually ended up working and apprenticing for a woman who was doing Earth plaster work, and that's where I got introduced to these earth pigments.”
“Both minerals—iron oxide and calcium carbonate—are really supportive for the soils, so they're not just biodegradable paints,” she said, her hands gray-black from the iron oxide paint she’d been spraying.
She used to work primarily in black and white, but she’s enjoying expanding into color: ocher for yellow and red dirt from the Sierra for rust color.
Despite its size, Anderson’s work is inherently ephemeral.
“In springtime, often the new growth just overtakes the painting. In winter, usually it's the rains,” she said.
But their transience—and the way they simply melt back into the earth—is part of the point.
Before she began working with natural pigments on the landscape, she worked on another type of large-scale ephemeral art: beach art on the Sonoma Coast, where she collaborated with the well-known beach artist Andres Amador.
“That's where I was able to train my perspective and develop the technical ability to work at this size and know how to navigate the shapes. Also, being a landscape designer, I can kind of do the micro-macro with that aerial perspective.”
Anderson enjoys collaborating with other artists and working on community projects.
“We were doing some stream restoration work, and I did a whole piece with salmon and illustrating the ecological work that's being done to promote salmon. I love finding ways that art can be a vehicle to bring more awareness of the natural world.”
She also takes commissions. Of her commissioned work, she said, “They're very site-specific—both of what that site is and often illustrating some of the flora or fauna of that area.”
You can see one of her large hillside pieces—three hawks—at Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa.
“There was a hawk nest right nearby where I was painting,” she said. “And the way I felt the shape of the hillside, it just felt like I wanted this flying motion and expansion there. And then birds are also their logo. So there’s lots of layers. The whole time I was painting the hawks were circling around me.”
Anderson feels that she’s found her artistic home in Sonoma County. “The yellow hills with oaks, the redwoods. I’ve travelled to a lot of places, but nothing compares. This is home.”
You can see Anderson’s site-specific ecological art installations on Nov. 4, from 1 pm to 4 pm at Green Valley Farm and Mill. This will be the only public viewing before they are washed back into the earth this winter. Please RSVP here.
