Climate change in watercolor 🎨
Nicole Kelner uses the whimsy of her watercolors to connect the dots of climate change for her growing audience.
If you work in clean energy circles, you’ve probably seen Nicole Kelner’s work, even if you don’t realize it. More recently, you may have seen The Clean Energy Coloring Book come across your social feed.
Perhaps her most recognized piece of art, Climate Stripes, compiles a number of colorful lines bleeding into whitespace. It’s an appealing compilation of color, but when you look closer—and read the subtext—you realize the lines mean something: It’s a timeline of global warming from 1850-2018. The lines move from cool to hot as the years go by. It isn’t new information that the world is getting hotter, but her piece makes you go, “Oh…”. It makes you reflect on all those cooler colors that came before. It draws you in and keeps you around to find out more, leaving you with a clear feeling of, “whoa” when you leave it.
Kelner does this again and again in her watercolors that translate the impact of climate change for her audience. Her work has been published in places like The Guardian and The Verge and she’s been commissioned by a number of clean energy companies to create pieces that are all at once digestible, simple and human. Somehow Kelner, who has no background in art or climate, can easily transfer complex climate concepts into works of art. And that’s worth talking about!
You’ve had quite the career journey. You started a coding school, sold the coding school, and worked in operations at a startup. How did you get from working at a tech startup to watercolor painting about climate change full time?
I've always been really creative and it's come out in different parts of my life. My very first business was a handbag business when I was 18: I taught myself how to sew, and made these purses with a a plastic pocket, and you could use your phone through this plastic pocket. And I grew up loving art, but I lost touch with that for a while.
In 2022, I decided to do this art challenge for fun, where I would paint a watercolor every day for 100 days. I had watercolored a little bit during COVID, during stressful times, and a new wave of COVID was hitting New York at that time. So I thought, “Okay, this is another stressful time, let me just go through this challenge, which will hopefully get me through the winter, and not seeing friends a lot, and navigating a potential career transition.” The plan wasn't to paint about climate, it was really just to paint, period. I was painting about random things: Happy New Year, baby otters. And then, 10 days in, I did one about kelp and carbon sequestration. I was posting on Twitter every day, even though I had maybe 400 followers at the time, and was mostly posting to the void.
But the kelp one got, I think 100 likes, and that was more than I ever had on anything combined. And I thought, “Let me do the rest of these 90 days about climate.” That's when it started to pick up. I was getting requests for custom paintings. I started making prints and t-shirts and mugs and all these fun merch things. I ended up quitting my job within four months and going full-time on art. I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half now and I work with all sorts of amazing climate startups and nonprofits and government organizations to help them simplify the climate work they're doing in through visuals that are accessible to anyone.
Let’s talk more about why your watercolors resonate with audiences. You touched on the simplicity of your paintings. Climate change subject matter is often complex, right? There are things that are scientifically and mathematically difficult to distill. Can you walk us through your process, maybe a piece that was particularly hard to distill?
I worked on a piece for The Guardian about carbon capture that was very hard. It was about carbon capture and power plants, and how there's potential for CO2 leakage in aquifers nearby. The process works a bit like this: to start, we'll do a creative session. I have them send me as much information as they can about what we're going to be working on in advance. I try to absorb as much as I can. And that's the same when I do my own pieces, where I try to take in as much information as possible. I'm a very visual learner, so I start thinking in pictures. And honestly, within 30 minutes I'm able to hone in on a pretty clear starting point at least. Then, I'll do two rounds of revisions on my iPad and then start painting. So, we'll go back and forth in digital form before I even touch a paintbrush to make sure we're synced up and have clarity on what they want the art to look like.
How important do you think this type of storytelling is to educating and also communicating about the climate crisis? What’s your opinion on the impact your work has had?
I feel really lucky, I think that this is the most impactful thing I've done in climate. I've worked at a startup and I was able to reach a few hundred or a few thousand people, but the work that I do now literally reaches millions, which is nuts. And it is all educational.
There's research around needing to see something multiple times for it to actually stick in your head. And the more little bits of these climate vignettes of information, if you see it multiple times, it'll stick. I think the impacts are really hard to calculate, but I hear a lot of simple anecdotes that show impact. One of my paintings is about how long it takes for a head of lettuce to decompose in a landfill, and it takes 25 years if it's not composted. And someone told me, “I started composting after I saw that!” Even that one little thing. That was a day where I thought, “I don't want to do a full painting, I'm just going to paint a head of lettuce and write some text.” Sometimes those have the most reach and impact on people.
I feel really lucky, I think that this is the most impactful thing I've done in climate.
Let’s talk a little bit more about the visual aspect of the work. If someone saw text about the lettuce, it may not have been as impactful as seeing a watercolor of decomposing lettuce.
I think the watercolors have been the game changer of this all. There are so many amazing designers doing work in the climate space, but a lot of them are in the traditional design styles that are trendy right now. So we're kind of desensitized towards that in some ways, because it's so normal to see flat, nice, sleek design. But the watercolors I do, people tell me they have that human touch to it, and so they stop and actually look at it. And I think that's what's been really special. I use very bright childlike colors, a lot of primary colors. I use a lot of pink and blue and aqua. It's not the graphs and charts you're used to seeing, it's really playful and vibrant, and I think that that's allowed it to touch different parts of people's hearts and minds and encourages them to slow down when they're reading the information.
Talking about childlike colors is a good transition to your most recent endeavor: a coloring book. Tell us a little bit about how that came to be, what is the importance of bringing this knowledge to the next generation, and how did you come up with the idea?
I am so jazzed about it. I came up with it because I eventually want to do an actual children's book, but I don't feel confident enough to do that right now. And I knew I wanted to do a project for the year.
The watercolors I do, people tell me they have that human touch to it, and so they stop and actually look at it. And I think that's what's been really special.
Last year, I made a coffee table book that was a compilation of my 40 favorite paintings from that 100-day challenge. I made that in hindsight, where I was like, let me just pull this together and try to make an order out of it, and it's beautiful. But it was really hard to go back and make sense of the art.
This time I decided I wanted to start from scratch with an intention and create a project. And almost immediately the theme of electrification popped to me because a lot of my clients work in clean energy, and it's something I love learning about. I think there's a lot of impact that can be had in that space, and there's a lot of really clear visuals, too, that relate to day-to-day life: homes and cars and things that people comprehend, like kitchen stoves, induction stoves.
I wanted it to be something for all ages, something that I would want to use. And I love adult coloring books, so I thought “Okay, this is cool because I think a lot of the people who follow me might enjoy doing this, but also they have kids.” I wasn't really thinking about it in the business lens at first, I just thought, “I want to do this.” But once I started doing it, I realized it was probably the smartest marketing thing I've ever done because I'm inherently attracting all these incredible people in clean energy, who either have families and care about the next generation, or are very artistic and crafty and want to color themselves. It's been really, really fun to create.
Working in the climate space can feel dark at times, what makes you feel hopeful?
I think learning makes me feel hopeful. The more I learn about the solutions and then translate them into art, the more I feel a sense of control and hope because I can clearly see that there are solutions out there. There are so many people working to make those solutions possible and more available. I think it's a really virtuous cycle because the more I learn about these things and then paint about them, the more people send me good climate news, and more good resources of things that I should be painting about that are positive solutions. So, it's sending that message out there that this exists, and then I get to hear about more cool things that are either going to be existing or already out there, and then communicating that. It makes me really hopeful.
(Water) Cooler Talk
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