She painted with a bold, Precisionist style not commonly associated with watercolor, rendering landscapes, industrial scenes, and houses with a Magic Realist touch that gave them a forlorn, isolated quality, somewhat in the manner of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper.

[5] Her father, Rynard, was a businessman; her mother, Anna, was a music and art lover who gave young Vanessa her first painting lessons.

She graduated from Whatcom High School and studied at the University of Washington before winning, in 1934, a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York.

[8] In 1937, Helder moved to Seattle to take up a Works Progress Administration (WPA) job offered by Bruce Inverarity, the Federal Art Project director for Washington.

This included painting murals at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia and at Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle (both now lost).

In 1939, at Inverarity's request, she began teaching classes in watercolor, oil painting, and lithography at the Spokane Art Center, working alongside avant-gardists such as Margaret Tomkins, Carl Morris, and Guy Anderson.

As an established professional working in a more traditional style, she was somewhat out of place on the faculty, but was able to spend a great deal of time roaming about Eastern Washington, painting landscapes.

A dozen of her paintings were hung alongside works by John James Audubon, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Andrew Wyeth.

[citation needed] Helder made some attempt to keep pace with post-war changes in artistic taste, but was eventually squeezed out of the New York galleries by the popularity of Abstract Expressionism.