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Growing up in Parkland in the 1990s, watercolor artist Kimberly Heise, 32, was enthralled with the natural beauty around her. She remembers an abundance of pine trees and wooded hammocks, and she gazed onto a forest of trees from her bedroom window. It was an idyllic time that resonates with her to this day.

“My love of nature comes from my childhood home in Parkland,” Heise says. “I spent a lot of time in nature as a kid.”

After graduating from Florida Atlantic University with a BFA in painting in 2016, Heise moved to Boca Raton, Delray Beach, and Miami and felt disconnected from nature. She discovered watercolors and decided to focus on scenes from nature as a way to reconnect to the natural world.

“Art became a way for me to feel connected with the natural world when access to habitats became sparse,” Heise says. Specializing in Florida native plants and animals, her style is a combination of hyper-realism with the accuracy of scientific illustration.

Now back in Parkland, Heise rides her bicycle through Covered Bridge Park, 6 Acre Wood Park, and other trails where she shoots photographs of flowers, plants, or wildlife that she later paints.

Collaborating with nonprofits, Heise creates original artwork for websites, trail signs, videos, guides, magazines, products, logos, and research presentations. “I’m partial to working with organizations that work to preserve our natural habitats and ecosystems,” she says.

Heise painted the Florida bonneted bat, a species of bat only found in South Florida and one of the most endangered mammals in North America, to bring awareness to conservation efforts.

She paints two hours each day in her home studio and devotes time to her newsletter and website, social media, emails, and other nonartistic, but necessary, tasks.

Heise says she is doing exactly what she envisioned. “Being able to sustain myself doing what I love is something I’ve wanted since my 20s,” she says. “Doing this full-time is amazing.

“I enjoy the process of painting,” Heise says “Envisioning beautiful things and bringing them to life is very satisfying.”

She became involved with the Florida Native Plant Society (FNPS), and its educational programs helped shape her work.

“Kim’s a wonderful woman, generous, friendly, and easy to work with,” says Mark Kateli, FNPS statewide president. “She’s a budding naturalist who showcases native plants and animals to raise awareness for our environment and has a bona fide talent and an astute hand in drawing animals and plants.”

For their conference, Heise donates a digital art piece and this year was featured on the front cover of The Palmetto, the group’s magazine.

Heise admires artists John James Audubon, Teagan White, and wildlife artist and illustrator Zoe Keller. “The more you learn about native species, the more exciting it becomes,” she says.

“Lawn weeds,” a native plant and host for butterflies, excite her. “Learning about these species helps me connect to Florida,” Heise says. “Florida is not just palm trees—there is so much joy and beauty here.

“It’s hard to see a native plant such as Chapman’s Cassia (a woody shrub) or Coreopsis (tickseed) and not get excited,” says Heise.

“Learning about these native habitats has made me a happier person,” she says.

Most recently, Heise completed a coloring book for the Everglades Foundation and has collaborated with the Miami nonprofit Bound by Beauty and created a field guide with 17 illustrations of native plants that host butterflies.

“This was one of my most enjoyable and meaningful projects,” the artist says.

“We have been fortunate to collaborate with Kim on our wildlife sanctuary, our field guide to wild plants that host butterflies, and others,” says Mary Benton, founding director of Bound by Beauty. “She has an affinity for the native flora and fauna and an extraordinary ability to bring them to life with watercolor.”

Benton notes, “Everybody who sees her posters is drawn to them more closely, which is our intent in educating people about the beauty and importance of nature—in this case, ‘lawn weeds.’”

Heise is also one of nine artists commissioned by West Palm Beach’s ArtLife Public Art program—”9 Artists 9 Spaces”—to create a temporary public work with the theme of play.

Titled “Birds at Play,” the mural features images of herons and egrets, whistling ducks, gallinule, kites and butterflies, painted buntings, and laughing and herring gulls. The artwork will be installed at the Mandel Library later this summer.

“I’m excited to be part of this project,” says Heise, who is creating the imagery in watercolor in separate panels, then Photoshopping them together. The finished image will be printed on vinyl and installed in the entranceway to the library by forklift.

Additionally, her exhibit “Florida Naturally Wild: Watercolor Painting by Kim Heise” runs through Aug. 26 at Kampong National Tropical Botanical Garden in Miami.

Going forward, Heise would love to have her work at Art Basel or a gallery and to have the ability to “cross-pollinate” (to use a nature term) between the fine art and conservation worlds. She says her best work is created with the intention of it being fine art.

“I’m thrilled when I set an intention for the work and the work rises to that intention,” she says.  “I’m most proud of having my art appreciated for the beauty of the art itself.”

To follow Heise’s latest works, sign up for her email newsletter at KimHeise.com/newsletter or follow her on Instagram and Facebook at KimHeiseArt. Original paintings and prints are also available for sale on her website.

 To learn more about the exhibit at Kampong National Tropical Botanical Garden, visit ntbg.org/events/florida-naturally-wild.

“I fell in love with black; it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all. … You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing.”
—Louise Nevelson

American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), known for her large, three-dimensional, wooden structures, worked primarily in monochromatic black or white.

Born Leah Berliawsky to Jewish parents in the Soviet Empire in 1899, she emigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was a child.

Growing up in Rockland, Maine, Nevelson moved to New York City to attend high school, where, after graduation, she got a job as a stenographer in a law office and met her future husband, Charles Nevelson, owner of a shipping company.

Calling herself “the original recycler,” Nevelson combed the streets of New York salvaging found objects, wood pieces, and other discarded items to use in her sculptures.

During the mid-1950s, she produced her first series of all-black wood landscape structures, describing herself as the “Architect of Shadow.”

“Shadow and everything else on Earth actually is moving,” she said at the time. “Movement—that’s in color, that’s in form, that’s in almost everything. Shadow is fleeting. … I arrest it and I give it a solid substance.”

Her sculpture titled “Shadow Chord,” created in 1969 and now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, where it was just restored, was created at the height of her artistic career and embodies the visual language of her work with complex wood assemblages and monochromatic color.

Consisting of stacked boxes completely covered by her signature flat black paint, the sculpture gives this installation the imposing presence of a cityscape that alters the viewer’s perception of light and space.

At the museum since 2001, the work was in need of repair. The restoration was funded by a grant from Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project, a global program providing grants to nonprofit cultural institutions to conserve historically or culturally significant works of art.

Since it began in 2010, the Art Conservation Project has funded the conservation of individual pieces of art through more than 237 projects in 40 countries across six continents.

Among the 13 museums in the U.S. that were awarded the grant this year, the Boca Raton museum is the only one in South Florida to be chosen.

“The Boca Raton Museum of Art is honored to receive this prestigious grant from the Bank of America Conservation Project,” says Irvin Lippman, the museum’s executive director. “Nevelson’s sculpture commands a singular position in our galleries, and we are grateful for this support for its restoration.

“With its engulfing, sensuous environment full of shadows and mystery, this artwork continues to be a favorite for our visitors,” Lippman says.

Nevelson studied painting, voice, and dance at the Art Students League in New York City and held her first solo exhibition in New York in 1941. Over the next several decades, she became a pioneer in large-scale installations, an uncommon achievement for women of her generation.

Nevelson, whose marriage to her husband ended when she was 42, struggled financially much of her life. It wasn’t until her early 70s that Nevelson focused on monumental outdoor sculptures, after being commissioned by Princeton University in 1969 to create a large-scale sculpture for them.

To this day, she is most known for her wooden, wall-like, collage-driven reliefs consisting of multiple boxes and compartments that hold abstract shapes and found objects from chair legs to balusters that she collected from items discarded on the streets.

Nevelson is also the first woman to gain fame in the U.S. for her public art. In 1978, New York City created a sculpture garden, titled Louise Nevelson Plaza and located in Lower Manhattan, to showcase her sculptures. It became the first public space in New York City to be named after an artist.

Her works are in the collections of major art institutions around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Tate in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

The newly refurbished sculpture is currently on view on the second floor at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real. Visit BocaMuseum.org.