Gallery News | November 2022

November 2022 at the Gallery

Volume 13, Issue 11

Artist of the Month:

Stefanie Culbertson

Kailua Village Artists featured artist for the month of November is watercolor artist and digital designer Stefanie Culbertson. She has been painting with watercolors over 33 years, after she moved to Hawaii in 1989 from the 'Old World' Germany. Her fascination with the lush beauty of this Island continues to inspire her art every day, and she has grown deep roots here. She holds a BA in Digital Design and started her own business Tiffany Arts Designs in 2006. Culbertson continuously expands her “Anuenue” (rainbow) and “Fire-Earth-Air-Water” series of watercolors.

Culbertson interweaves legends and deeper meanings within her watercolor paintings, and often hides things within. One of her featured pieces, "Anuenue Kona Coffee", was originally created for the 50th Anniversary Kona Coffee Festival in November 2020. The festival was cancelled that year due to the Covid Pandemic. This year, she went back to her watercolor and combined it with digital design, adding the words, "100% Kona Coffee" to honor the pride of Kona coffee farmers, as well as their determination to protect the reputation of the local bean and not "dilute" it by blending with cheaper non-Kona coffee.

Culbertson reflects on other aspects of this particular painting: She was inspired by old Irish legends of Leprechauns, (like Hawaiian menehune), and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. "Drinking my daily morning coffee while viewing coffee trees outside my window, I saw my own 'pot of gold' as a burlap bag filled with roasted coffee beans." The painting also showcases a rainbow Hawai'i Island, the island that includes Kona and the roughly 30-mile long Kona coffee growing belt.

More on Stefanie Culbertson and her rainbow watercolor art

Save the Date

Starting on November 25th through December 30th, KVA's Annual Holiday Charity Tree will be up in the gallery. The tree will feature handmade holiday ornaments created and donated by member artists of the cooperative. 100% of sales will benefit the Kiwanis of Kailua-Kona. On Saturday, December 3 from 5 to 7 pm at the Gallery, we will host our 24^th Annual Holiday Artist Reception. There will be pupus, refreshments and music.

Coffee and Coffee-Art

Coffee growing, processing, and consumption winds its way through Kona culture. Coffee culture peaks during the Kona Coffee Festival, which is this month, November 4 - 13. Check out the cool line up of coffee-related events planned, including a quilt show, seminars on composting, cupping contests, history, baking, tasting, pageantry, art, and more! www.konacoffeefest.com

First introduced to the Hawaiian islands in the 1820s, Kona coffee didn’t become a world wide sensation until 1873, when it won a “Recognition Diploma" at the World’s Fair in Vienna, Austria. In 1899 when the coffee market crashed, coffee plantation owners leased the land to mostly Japanese workers who had been brought in to work in the sugar cane plantations. Each small parcel was five to twelve acres, and the tradition of the small family coffee farm was born, and continues to this day.

Kona’s geography creates perfect coffee growing conditions. The Kona coffee belt runs a total of roughly 30 miles starting just north of Ocean View up to the Kona airport. It is about 2-3 miles wide, at elevations between 700-2500 feet above sea level. The higher elevations mean cooler temperatures, afternoon cloud cover, and the perfect amount of rainfall. Today, the Kona coffee belt has about 800 coffee farms that produce more than 2 million pounds of coffee annually.

Some of our artists are part of this family farm tradition and many of us grow and process our own coffee. It also inspires our art and here are a few examples.

"Kona In My Cup" painting by Christal Nylin

"Coffee Flower in Bloom" photograph by Kathleen Carr

"Pineapple and Coffee Berries" mosaic by Kathleen Jaeger

Art Journeys with Shannon Nakaya: Pigments, Part 2

Between 1835 and 1842, the Winsor and Newton Company in London, introduced the first prepared paints (as opposed to powdered pigments that the artist would mix with a binder) and the first screw cap paint tubes. Along with lighter and more portable easels, these developments drew a subset of painters out of their studios into the natural world.

Over the next few years later, railways would expand and expedite dissemination of these novel art supplies. Impressionist painters like Monet and Renoir advanced the study of (natural) light and color in art and popularized outdoor plein air painting , a method that is taught and practiced even among contemporary painters.

"Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge" painted by Claude Money in 1899. The garden and pond were actually cultivated by Monet himself.

"Monet On His Bridge" painted on site, in Giverny, France, by Christal Nylin in 2013. Of course, the likeness of Monet was based on historical portrayals.

Connect with five of our member artists, and meet eight other local artists, in this Open Studio Art Tour. Kona Palisades is about 15 minutes north of the KVA gallery just mauka of the Kona Airport. Saturday and Sunday, November 19 and 20, from 10 am to 4 pm.

Call (808) 345-1549 or email KonaPalasadesArtists@gmail.com for more information or to receive their e-newsletter. Or see more on their Facebook page @KonaPalisadesArtists.

"I like to show the unseen forces of nature, like the faery realm."

In "Anuenue Kope" (Rainbow Coffee), Culbertson transports us into a secret world amidst ripening coffee cherry within a forest of coffee trees. There is even a fairy sitting on a leaf, holding a coffee cherry and blessing it. Culbertson shows the interconnectedness of the seen and unseen worlds using a transparent rainbow as if it were a magical lens. For Culbertson, the imagery is intuitive. "It is like seeing beyond natural vision, into another realm." Through her mastery of watercolor paints, she invites others to experience the mystical world-natural world duality.

For those unfamiliar with how the coffee bean gets from the plant into the cup, it is quite involved. Coffee cherry is hand-picked, a process that would be less of an undertaking were it not for the fact that most coffee grows on hot, rugged, and hilly terrain. Then the bean is extracted from the cherry, then dried, then roasted and separated from the chaff or "skin." Historically, harvest was a family and community affair with every able-bodied person put to work; a part of Hawaii Island culture that few visitors experience. During her time on the Big Island, Culbertson has experienced the full scope of coffee culture. She has picked coffee cherry from the tree, pan-roasted coffee on the stove, and worked as a barista.

In her latest coffee painting, "Every Bean Has A Dream," Culbertson chronicles the journey of the red coffee cherries on the tree, to dried beans held on one leaf, roasted beans on another, then brewed coffee flowing into a cup. Bathed by her signature translucent rainbow, this painting portrays our blissful morning cup of joe as a gift from the natural and mystical worlds.