Painter and wine educator Angela Kallsen finds the individual personalities of wine grape vines

MADE IN ST. PAUL

A painting of a grapevine by artist Angela Kallsen hangs over a small fireplace in her studio in St. Paul. Many of Kallsen’s paintings and mixed-media art focus on finding individual personalities within plants, animals and natural objects, including grapevines and wine grapes. PHOTOS BY JARED KAUFMAN — PIONEER PRESS

Painter Angela Kallsen shows, on Dec. 30, 2024, an example of “visual notetaking” in the form of a watercolor sketch she created during a wine tour in Europe. Kallsen and her husband, a sommelier and wine educator, regularly lead international wine-and-art tours.

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By Jared Kaufman

jkaufman@pioneerpress.com

There’s a coyote skull on the windowsill of painter and wine educator Angela Kallsen’s studio in the Dow Artists Building on University Avenue. And some rocks, and some shells, and some pinecones, and there’s a grapevine fragment leaning against the wall.

“I cannot take a walk out in the woods without picking up something and putting it in my pocket,” she joked.

One of Kallsen’s mixed-media works, which hangs in her studio, is split down the middle: On one half, a vibrant orange marine creature fills the space, with an oceanic blue background barely visible; on the other, the same creature is bleached bone-white and stuffed into a sterile jar, presumably for lab research. Another, similarly split, depicts a small bird skull in a brown sketched style in the left third of the canvas, and the remainder, a separate image, seems to show that same animal — a determined-looking blue bird — alive and mid-flight.

The name of Kallsen’s college degree, an interdisciplinary program she cobbled together for herself at the University of Minnesota, tells you everything you need to know: She holds a bachelor of science in the pictorial representation of Native cultures and natural environments.

In other words: Her paintings depict nature, but more specifically, Kallsen seems to be asking that we consider every bird, every plant, every rock as an individual, just like you or I, with a fate all its own.

This theme is especially on her mind regarding grapevines and winemaking, a predominant topic in her current work, she said.

“I just love the idea of vines standing in as allegories for people,” she said. “I really love to find one vine: ‘I’m going to paint you. You have a personality and a story, and I’m going to tell your story.’”

Many grapevines are propagated by grafting a branch from an existing vine onto rootstock, which allows the grower to selectively reproduce desirable traits in the grapes, she explained. Vineyards planted this way consist of plants that are all essentially genetic clones of one another.

But, as Kallsen pointed out, the vines will still grow differently from one another. Sometimes they stretch out or wrap around themselves; sometimes they develop gnarled, knotty growths or little shrivelled arms or unexpected forks and splits. For some grape varieties, tougher growing conditions make for more vibrant, complex wines.

“The vine just keeps going — it’s not going to let that stop it,” she said. “I like to think about that like people, with life experience. We learn what works for us and where we belong.”

And, like people, grapevines can’t grow alone, she said.

“You need a rich environment to grow in — other vines, other people — and if you’re starved of community, you’re just trying to grow in dry soil and waiting for someone to artificially pump something onto you,” she said.

For Kallsen, wine is an intersection of both her professional and personal lives: Her husband, sommelier Jason Kallsen, founded Twin Cities Wine Education in the 1990s and leads wine classes around the Twin Cities. In recent years, the Kallsens have begun teaming up with friends and colleagues in Europe to host travel experiences: Jason Kallsen teaches about winemaking and wine culture on-location, and Angela Kallsen leads creativity and art workshops to encourage what she called “visual notetaking.”

Next month, they’ll be leading a tour to Provence, in France, and a September trip to northern Portugal sold out unexpectedly quickly, Angela Kallsen said. They’ll be returning to different regions of both countries — Bordeaux in France and the interior of Portugal — for wine and art trips this fall.

Whether through paintings like hers or other means, when people come to learn about and appreciate grapevines and stories of how wine grapes grow, Angela Kallsen said, it changes the way they approach wine.

“Wine tastes better when you know where it’s from and you know the stories,” she said. “When you taste a wine blind, it can be hard to truly appreciate it for everything that it is. It’s more than just the physical juice in the glass — it’s the story, it’s the people, it’s the love, it’s everything that went into it.”

Kallsen Studio >> 2242 W. University Ave.; kallsenstudio.com; find info about open studios and classes at @kallsenstudio on Facebook or Instagram