From curb appeal to wall art, Helen Jones Lea translates garden design to picture perfect.
Arts & Antiques
Garden-Inspired Art
Whether it’s in her garden or on canvas, a local woman brings colorful life to all her creations.
When Lilian Clay Jones took five-year-old Helen to her first day at Brookside’s Border Star School, little did she foresee what would happen next. Immediately introduced to paints and paper on an easel to  ease the obvious pain of first separation, the little girl fell in love. Neither mother nor teacher anticipated the soul of a painter would awaken with a flaming passion that still burns brightly 70 years later.

That passion has taken Helen Jones Lea, wife and mother of six, across Europe and back again to Brookside. In the mid-1980s, the visual and emotional impact of a traditional English cottage garden struck Helen almost as forcefully as did the paints and paper that first day of school. Old and new loves combined as she transformed an enclosed terrace into her own cottage garden to paint. “My garden is my heart,” she confides.

Helen turned her terrace, enclosed by brick planters and mature trees, into an  artful exuberance of textures and hues. Like her paintings, her garden is “loose, colorful and an emotional response to reality,” Helen notes. She removed a few concrete blocks here and there to encourage sedum and surprises to soften what had been a sterile harshness. Brick planters — some in deep shade, others in full sun — burst forth with perennials and shrubs. Pots on pavers, pedestals and tables sprout masses of plants that tumble over, reach upward, drape softly and bloom profusely.

At the height of summer, garden ornaments like Helen’s blue elephant add whimsical style to the landscape by peeking out from under a cascade of flowering coleus mixed with spider plant offspring next to vibrant pots of red geraniums. In the deepest shade, a nook holds a fountain backed with a full-length mirror to catch sunlight reflecting off the house across the garden.

Whether speaking of her garden or her art, Helen confesses, “I try to restrain myself as to colorations. Still, it seems to work best when I toss in a lot of colors.” Those colors help her capture not only the image before her but the emotions she feels as she translates her garden to canvas. The most vivid emotion that comes through Helen’s paintings is joy. The child who found joy at her first easel still communicates her discovery with the rest of us.

Helen’s paintings are collected both in the U.S. and abroad. She has shown at England’s Tate Gallery; McCaughen & Burr in St. Louis; at the Off the Wall Gallery in Savannah; Rick Moore Gallery of Naples, Fla.; and locally at various shows and exhibits. Her artwork also can be viewed online at her website, helenleagallery.com, and at Eva Reynolds Fine Arts in Overland Park, evareynoldsfinearts.com.

Helen’s garden-inspired artwork has found its way onto more than 200 commercial products since embracing the concept of painting gardens. As a fabric designer, her clients include Martex Sheets, Brooke Shields & Company, Jantzen, Anna Cole, Nipon, Perry Ellis, Wamsetta, Fieldcrest and Missoni. Lowe’s currently carries a garden banner bursting with a dazzling explosion of Helen’s Brookside flowers.

Everything from calendars and stationary to jigsaw puzzles and shower curtains have been graced by the blossoms of Helen’s garden and others she’s visited across the globe. As an artist who realizes that when a painting becomes too finished, it falls asleep, Helen observes, “if I’ve done my job well, that love of the process shows itself in the end result.” That love has earned her a reputation in both the fine arts and commercial arts. As for her love of gardens, “all of that visual stimulation exhilarates me so that my hand, as it holds the brush, pulses through thick or thin paint in a rhythm that feels almost like an automatic response. If I’m lucky, that sensual energy will  translate itself onto the canvas,” or the greeting card, gift wrap, and covers of social books and photo albums.