Painting the Shadows: Meet Community Creative Laura Olesen-Berge
For watercolor artist Laura Olesen-Berge, inspiration is everywhere at Bloedel Reserve—in the movement of light across a landscape, the changing shapes of shadows, and the quiet beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
Laura is one of Bloedel Reserve’s Community Creatives, a group of artists who find inspiration in the Reserve’s landscapes and share their creative perspectives with the community. After more than 30 years of working in watercolor, Laura continues to find new things to learn from the medium and new things to see in the natural world.
Laura and her husband, Rick, recently moved to Seabeck from the Washington, D.C., area. Her journey as an artist began during graduate school, where she studied history.
“I started drawing and painting as a mental break from all the reading and writing,” Laura says. “I started out with a kids’ set of watercolors from the grocery store and just played with them at first.”
Over time, that playful exploration grew into a lifelong artistic practice. While working as a civilian Contracting Officer for the Navy, Laura continued taking watercolor classes and developing her skills. Her work also brought her to the Pacific Northwest, including trips to the shipyard in Bremerton.
After retiring, Laura and Rick decided they wanted to move back West. Their thoughts kept returning to the Kitsap Peninsula.
“We feel so fortunate to live here amid all this natural beauty and inspiration!” Laura says. “I have yet to retire from watercolors—I continue to learn watercolors every day.”
The Movement of Water
Laura was drawn to watercolor because of its unique relationship with water itself.
“I was drawn to watercolors because of the way the paint moves in water,” she says. “It’s a very dynamic medium that allows for happy accidents and which can also be exacting.”
Watercolor is sometimes described as an unforgiving medium because of its translucency. Unlike opaque paints, it can be difficult to simply paint over a mistake. But Laura sees those unexpected moments as part of the creative process.
“While it’s true that some ‘mistakes’ are permanent, you can learn to be creative with them and turn them into opportunities,” she says.
That openness to surprise seems particularly well suited to painting landscapes, where light, weather, and the natural world are constantly changing.
Finding Inspiration at Bloedel
For Laura, Bloedel Reserve offers an abundance of inspiration.
“Bloedel is an inspiration! There is always something beautiful happening—the plants, the light!”
Before moving to Washington, Laura was a master gardener in Maryland, where she cultivated her own one-acre botanical garden. It was the intersection of gardening and watercolor that led her toward her current interest in landscape painting.
At Bloedel, she has 140 acres of landscapes to explore.
“Bloedel provides acres and acres of beautiful landscapes!” she says.
During her time as a Community Creative, Laura plans to pay particular attention to the interplay of light and shadow. She’ll use her camera to record scenes throughout the Reserve, capturing moments when sunlight and shadow come together in especially compelling ways. Later, those photographs will become references for her watercolor paintings.
“You’ll sometimes hear about various artists being called ‘painters of light,’” Laura says. “With watercolors, an artist is a painter of shadows.”
In watercolor, the lightest value of a painting is often the white of the paper itself. Artists build their paintings from light to dark, gradually adding layers of color and reserving the deepest shadows for last.
“As a Community Creative, Bloedel allows me to record with my camera scenes where light and shadow are playing together,” Laura says. “And then I paint the shadows.”
Through her work, Laura invites us to look more closely at the landscapes we might otherwise pass by—to notice the way light filters through foliage, how shadows define the contours of a garden, and how a fleeting moment can be preserved through paint.
To learn more about Laura’s work, contact her at [email protected].
