Leaf of the Day: Florida Orange

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Here I am in Florida and only today I realised that orange blossom is the State flower. I could be forgiven because it’s not so easy to find an orange tree locally but there are some obvious clues.
We live in Orange County, Orange Avenue is three blocks away and the notorious OBT, Orange Blossom Trail, parts of which are synonymous with extreme low life, runs north-south through Orlando.

Oranges were brought by the Spanish to “La Florida” and became established in the wild, where the early American naturalist, John Bartram, in his journal entry in 1766, writes of them growing growing on the banks of Salt Springs, their wonderful refreshing fruit and delicate perfume.
However the citrus industry really began to take off in the 19th century and by 1880 oranges, lemons, grapefruit and limes were being shipped and sent by rail to New York and Philadelphia.

However, just as earlier this year, Florida is subject to terrible frosts and in 1894 and 1899, the satsuma orange trees were virtually wiped out. The last great freeze was in 1980s when vast acres of citrus groves were destroyed, many owned by Tropicana. The unreliability of the climate has discouraged any major regeneration and who needs oranges when you have Disney?

Here is a saucy American slightly Disney version of Nell Gwynne.

poster images from art.com

Another reminder of the great old orange days is of course the famous train, (and fiddle tune)”The Orange Blossom Special” bringing city dwellers of New York down to the sun kissed shores of Florida. Inaugurated in 1925 I can only imagine how wonderful it must have been to leave the cold city streets of New York to travel in style to the sun.

Well talk about her ramblin’
She’s the fastest train on the line
Well talk about her travellin’
She’s the fastest train on the line
She’s the Orange Blossom Special
Rollin’ down the seaboard line3.

Well, I’m going down to Florida
Get some sand in my shoes
Or maybe California
Get some sand in my shoes
I’ll ride the Orange Blossom Special
And lose those New York blues

I found this great image and further links to Florida history here http://www.spacecoastweb.org/blog/florida/history/

On this day of financial gloom take a second to smile as you watch these kids playing this great blue grass anthem. Check out little Katie giving it her all, “Go Katie”

or a classic bit of Johnny Cash

A footnote on American trains.. don’t you just love them? We live near the railway track and hear and feel the long slow Amtrack train as rumbles and hoots its way along the Winter Park loop. We can hear the constant rise and fall of its plaintive whistle for a good half hour warning people away from the largely unprotected track. To us Brits brought up on old American movies of pioneering rail travel, the particular clanging sound of the crossing gates and the mournful whistle evoke ideas of freedom, of wide open spaces, of hobos flipping the freight cars and great railroad songs with those lonesom’ harmonica solos.
We love the train. Our neighbours think we are strange.

In this drawing I have tried some burnishing where the colour is smoothed down. It’s an interesting technique and blends the colours more but makes the surface very slippery and difficult to work over. The drawing could be more finished but at the moment I don’t want to spend more than one day on a drawing unless its something special. I still consider all this experimental. I persevere.
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Orange Blossom

Leaf of the Day: Spotty Dumb Cane

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This pretty spotty leaf is a very small one from a much bigger plant, which I am sure is a diffenbachia, growing in a shady side road here.
The diffenbachia is a well known houseplant in the UK and another to be treated with some respect. It’s called the “dumb cane” with good reason as the plant contains tiny, needle sharp, calcium oxalate crystals. These puncture the cells and release a protein called asparagine, which causes severe inflammation of soft tissues. Chewing on the leaves makes the tongue swell and can restrict both speech and breathing. A guide I read here advises that you should “dissuade your rabbits, canaries, dogs and cats from snacking on the leaves.”

Its medical uses are, as you can imagine, interesting.
The German pharmacologist G Madeus in 1938 writing about some if its unusual applications had found that Amazon Indians used it, not only as an ingredient for poison arrows, but also to sterilize their enemies. In parts of the Caribbean it used to be thought that chewing a leaf was an effective temporary contraceptive. I can only assume that your lover would be struck dumb as well…. “whispering sweet nothings” would become more truth than romantic foreplay, some ladies possibly finding it an added attraction to be spared the verbal encouragement.

In light of this alarming information I think that, in addition to the treasured pets, you need to dissuade your man from snacking on this plant lest he be rendered both speechless and useless. (There must be a joke in there somewhere..)

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Dumb Cane

Norman Rockwell and Winter Park Art

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On Thursday I went to see the Norman Rockwell Exhibition here at the Orlando Museum.

You would have to be the worst of cynics and have a heart of stone not to be moved by some of his paintings. The beautifully observed scenes of ordinary life are both funny and tender. Rockwell has his critics but he himself was happy to be an illustrator and “a teller of stories”.
This is the first time I have seen the original paintings, their size, their excellence in execution. The sheer virtuosity of some of his brushwork is breathtaking, working sometimes in thick impasto, sometimes in pale glazes where the strong underdrawing can be seen quite plainly and also forms the basic structure of the finished painting.
A large section of the exhibition is devoted to the work “Southern Justice” which depicts the deaths of 3 Civil Rights workers who were killed for their efforts to register African American voters.

We see Rockwell’s methods of working from his own staged photographs but also the original inspiration for the composition, the 1962 Pulitzer-winning photograph by Hector Rondon, “Aid from the Padre” showing a priest holding a soldier during the left wing uprising in Venezuela.

The painting was done for Look magazine in 1963 but interestingly they decided to accompany the article with an earlier possibly more atmospheric rough sketch.

Working for Look gave Rockwell more chance to address the problems that were current in America, particularly civil rights, which also prompted one of his most striking pictures, that of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by US marshalls.

Follow this link to a short interesting blog posting by DB Dowd “Welcome to the Neighbourhood, Race Rockwell and New Hampshire” which discusses Rockwell and his anti racist stand in the light of the current elections here.

Now, living here in the American South, I view these images with a sharpened perception. I watch from the sidelines what goes on, and what is said, with some deepening dismay. Divides seem as deep and prejudice now finds new fuel in anti Hispanic feeling.

In contrast I also went to the Winter Park Spring art show today. A huge outdoor show of over 200 artists. It seems unfair to have a master of painting showing just down the road and I saw very little which I felt was of any value. Some very good technicians, in both oils and watercolour but predictable traditional images, flowers, palmy swampy Florida landscapes, fruit and still life (and the odd awful nude..) I heard one very nice lady contemplating a nice painting of a nice bowl of flowers on a nice cloth saying. ” ..oh I do like art I can understand”. It was indeed a very nice painting with a nice $7500 price tag.
How far has Kandinsky’s vision of abstraction, now almost 100 years ago, really got us I wonder?.. but if you want to make a living as an artist you have to sell what people want to buy ..it’s a difficult situation. The commercial artist does what he or she is asked for but sometimes can produce exceptional work of great importance and Rockwell is a prime example. If you don’t want to be a “commercial” artist you need a private income.
There was quite a lot of formula painting too, each piece nicely done with some good slick tricks of the trade. Learn a few of these and you can churn the pictures out quicker than a sweat shop in Taiwan. (Top in my pet hates are formula painting and the grotesque semi pornographic nudes masquerading as a “celebration” of the female form. They are beloved of the tacky galleries on the Costa del Sol, destined, no doubt, to adorn the walls of some sleazy expat petty criminal in Marbella.)

However there wasnt too much of that in Winter Park, follow this link to see the work for yourself, 49th Winter Park Sidewalk show. Some of the ceramics are stunning.

One lovely quote from the Rockwell exhibition is very relevant here. He once said to his son.
” Do you know why Breugel was able to paint such beautiful trees? Because he painted each one as an individual.”

We artists should all take note of that.

The Harvesters

Leaf of the Day: Kmart Pansy

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Today my first coloured flower. A pretty pansy from Kmart after the exotic, if a bit gruesome, carrion cactus.
How can you not be completely charmed by these delicate and exquisitely coloured flowers. Their serious little nodding faces giving them their name and meaning, from the French “pensee“, thought. We take them for granted in some ways because they are common and fairly hardy. There are a few struggling for survival in a nearby apartment block garden and I really want to rush out one night with a trowel and gather them all up for some TLC.

Modern pansies are related to the little blue violas which had been cultivated in Greece since the 4th Century B.C, mainly for medicinal purposes. The pansy, as we know it, was developed by Admiral Lord Gambier and his gardener William Thompson on the Gambier estate at Iver, Buckinghamshire in the 1800s. They crossed various violas gradually encouraging more pleasing patterns and larger blooms. The familiar blotch that gives the pansy much of its character was chance seedling which was developed into the variety Medora in 1839.
A darling of the Victorians, the pansy was celebrated in poetry, literature and the “Language of Flowers”. Giving a bunch of flowers would became a minefield of innuendo and be heavy with significance. I am sure that many a budding romance must have been stopped dead in its tracks by the inclusion of an inappropriate flower.

Of course flowers were metaphors for the human condition well before the Victorian era. The significance of Shakespeare’s references to flowers would have been easily understood by his audience.
Here is the wild pansy in Ophelia’s famous “garland” speech from Hamlet:

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember.
And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts,
There’s fennel for you, and columbines.
There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me;
we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your rue with a difference.
There’s a daisy.
I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died;
they say he made a good end.”

In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Oberon drops a potion of wild pansy onto the eyelids of the sleeping Titania, he asks Puck to assist.

“Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.”

Everyone should have some of these sweet flowers, and love and cherish them.
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Pansy

Leaf of the Day: Carrion Cactus

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Never tell people that you are interested in unusual things.. you never know what they will give you!….

I had a blissful day today. Firstly I went to the Orlando Museum of Art to see the Norman Rockwell exhibition and then on to Leu Gardens. The Rockwell was a really interesting show and I am writing a separate post about it.
As I was lingering in the citrus grove at Leu getting my fix of orange blossom scent, Pedro came by on his buggy and decided I should see some of the interesting things in the gardens. He showed me the most delicate little orange tree with tiny oranges, the calamondon, which grows in his native Philippines, the exquisitely scented osmanthus known as the tea or sweet olive, leaves with bright red veins, pretty little annuals with flowers like orchids, the star anise tree with its aniseed scented leaves, the herb arugula and of course because I am British we went to see the tea plants.
I came back with tea seeds, a piece of resurrection fern, some little calamondons, a snippet of a red crown of thorns to hopefully propagate and this lumpy piece of the carrion cactus.

photo from wikipedia

This extraordinary plant the stapelia giantea also known as the starfish cactus produces a big star shaped flower that both looks and smells like rotting meat. The flower’s often red, wrinkled, and hairy surface mimics a small dead animal which, together with its smell of decomposition, attracts flies, who, hoping for a nice meal of putrefying flesh, trample around this wrinkly hairy surface collecting pollen as they go. How does a plant “know ” to mimic a dead animal? Triffids really don’t seem so impossible do they? The one good thing is that the flower doesn’t snap shut on the visiting flies. They are left to go on their way and pollinate others.
I do hope I can get my little piece to grow. Apparently the smell of the flowers is not too bad if they are kept outside!

I had such an interesting time and Pedro is a mine of information about the plants, recipes, mythology, superstitions and philosophy.. he told me that you should not say thank you for the gift of a plant, so I just had to thank him for all his help instead.

Not much time for drawing today so a quick sketch. The structure of the plant is interesting in that the stem has 4 sides which sit at right angles to each other.
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Carrion Cactus

Leaf of the Day: Persimmon 482 and Lotus Eating

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Today I walked down to our other local supermarket Publix. It is probably the Tesco of Orlando whereas Albertsons is more the equivalent of Sainsburys. They both have excellent fruit and veg counters. I am short of time today and I saw this little persimmon or sharon fruit which I thought would be both nice to draw and good practice with yellows and oranges.

The American name ‘persimmon’ is adapted from the native Indian word pesimin, early settlers would learn from the Indians to leave it on the tree to ripen until well into October or it is a bitter fruit. Recipes for cooking with persimmons and making wine are many and various as are the varieties of this fruit.
The “Diaspyros lotus” , the date plum, translates loosely as “fruit of the gods”, and is one of the contenders for the wonderfully dangerous lotus fruit mentioned in the Odyssey. Eating the fruit erased the memory. The desire to return home was replaced by the desire to stay in idleness and pleasure with the “lotus eaters”. Odysseus had a problem persuading his men back on the boat..who could blame them.

A passage from Tennyson’s strangely alluring poem “the Lotos Eaters” explains their feelings.

“Round and round the spicy downs the yellow lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll’d to starboard, roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. “

Perhaps my occasional expat longings for home might be cured with a plate of these delicious fruit.

I spent most of the day considering my watercolours, reading up about which are transparent and making yet more colour charts. My approach to watercolours has in the past been a bit haphazard and as it is really important to keep colours clean and fresh for botanical painting its time to be more disciplined. For anything you need to know about watercolour visit http://www.handprint.com/ It’s a fantastic site, full of technical information about every aspect of watercolour. I am going to put a links box for good art sites on soon.
Meanwhile the coloured pencil work continues.
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Persimmon

Leaf of the Day : A Terbinate Fruit

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I do like the strange and odd in life and this is a very strange fruit indeed. Although it looks like some bizarre composite it is real, and not just a bad drawing, I promise. I found a few of these fallen “fruit” in Leu gardens and luckily they had fallen next to their name tag. This is the fruit (and a tiny leaf) of Pereskia Grandifolia the Rose cactus. Some of the fruits which had fallen on the floor were linked together like the one I have drawn, originally this one was a chain of three.

I have yet to see the flowers in real life, but they look very pretty from the photos on the Internet. I don’t quite understand how the fruit develop in these chains and on the tree at Leu Gardens the leaves grow in an odd way too, straight out of the trunk which in turn has huge ferocious spines.
I have read that the fruits are described as “terbinate with leaflike bracts. Turbinate meaning “like a spinning top or an inverted cone” Originally from Brazil, where it is colloquially called “pray for us”, it is a cactus but with edible broad leaves that look just like regular leaves.

It’s related to other edible cacti including prickly pears and the amazingly beautiful Dragon fruit which I do hope to find here to draw.I first came across this in Nicaragua served for breakfast in Hostel Oasis in Granada. I had never seen a fruit of such a beautiful colour and only now know what it was.






Dragon fruit

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Pereskia , Rose cactus

Leaf of the Day: Turkey Tail Fungus

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This is the most delicate little fungus, trametes versicolor. It’s so light and thin just like paper and beautifully layered. They seem to come in many different colours and are common here and in the UK too. Mine was not particularly spectacular but pretty and quite a challenge to draw in the dreaded coloured pencils, but I persevere. This came from the lovely woods at Bulow Plantation where we went just over a week ago. I also found a piece of bark with the most beautiful green lichen which I will tackle another day, its terribly complicated and I dont feel quite up to it yet.

No explanation necessary for the name of course. Here in the USA it is definitely safer to be a wild turkey fungus than just a regular wild turkey that’s for sure.
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Turkey Tail Fungus

Leaf of the Day: Variegated Ginger

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This weekend summer arrived as the clocks went forward and the temperatures slipped backwards. The weather at the moment yo-yos from stuffy, hot and humid to very cold. We had some torrential rain on Friday and now I see that all the deciduous trees are beginning to get new and bright green leaves, catkins and new flowers.. I will not be able to keep up with them.
I made myself go back to the coloured pencils today and so here is the top 12 inches of a very large variegated ginger leaf. I liked the patterning so concentrated on that. They are another municipal plant seen in the Mall borders and office block gardens. This is the Alpinia zerumbet a member of the edible ginger family the catchily named Zingiberaceae. It can grow to a tall and exuberant 6ft as do many things here in Florida. If only I too could add a couple of inches here in this luxuriant climate. (upwards, hard ..outwards, all too easy)

I still am not happy with how the pencils feel. I sharpened them religiously but still miss having the point of a nice springy brush to draw fine lines with.. these feel terribly clumsy in comparison. It also seemed to take an age to just get some basic colour down. However I will persevere. Left to my own devices I would use then quite differently but the constraints of the course require accuracy rather than flamboyant approximation.
There are some artists who do produce exquisite work in coloured pencils..so it’s not the medium it’s just me.
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Variegated Ginger

A Journey to Africa and India

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No drawing today but a screen shot of my other blog just to prove I have not been seduced by Mickey and his gang just yet.
I have spent all day getting this up and running and the first post written. Just the research takes hours and that is without getting horribly but wonderfully lost in numerous blind alleys.
If you know of anyone who might be interested in the subjects of John Fowler of Leeds agricultural implements (steam ploughs and traction engines and the like) and /or Africa and India in the 1920s and 1930s do pass this on to them. I have many missing details..
The site is
http://www.darlingpopsy.blogspot.com/

The letters and photographs sent back from Africa and India to my mother are delightful. The first ones from my grandfather Allan Thackeray when he was on his own in Kenya are charming. They are to a young girl (my mum was 8 at the time) so tell about the wildlife and the beauty of Africa..and his neglect in letterwriting.. but then who could blame him faced with such a great adventure