Leaf of the Day: A Curate’s Egg and Months of Beetroot

My work on the plantain is over for now. It is, maybe, a curate’s egg, but then it is my first botanical painting.
However people feel about this kind of painting, for an artist it is an exercise in close observation and discipline. Discipline in being careful and methodical. It is so easy, after years of painting, to become lazy and slapdash and to rely on some slick tricks. So however frustrating and agonisingly slow this may be, it will be worth while.
My personal taste in painting covers a broad spectrum. I am delighted by both Rothko and Rembrandt, but I had always admired the beauty and the particular quirkiness of botanical paintings, and they are, what they are. If you wanted to write some “art bollocks” about them you could probably intellectualise about the “examination and isolation of the object ” but really they are just honest bits of painting.
What perhaps they do do, is to ask you to look closer at things you may see everyday.
I recently found this old 1997 review “Beetroot Descending a Staircase” of Shirley Sherwood’s collection of botanical art which was then on show in New York. It was written by Ann Raver who writes beautifully about gardening in the New York Times and although more than ten years old, all she says is still relevant.

“DR. SHIRLEY SHERWOOD peered hard at ”Beetroot,” a watercolor by the Australian painter Susannah Blaxill, and moved in on it like some botanist observing a rare vegetable in the field.
”You have to really stick your nose into it,” said Dr. Sherwood, ”Look at every one of these green bits built up with 15 layers of paint,” she added. ”And the same with the red. Then stand back and see how she uses the white of the paper.”
We stood back to look at the Blaxill, A spot of light — really just unpainted paper — glowed from somewhere inside the beet, making the vegetable float in pure white space like an abstract object in a void.
Yet, ”Beetroot” is more beetlike than any beet I have ever seen. Its crinkled red and green leaves, its vermilion stems edged with purple, the sheen on its rounded hairy root are accurate, yes. But there is an intimacy to this beet, a vigor so condensed that it verges on surreal.
The best way to know plants, as any gardener knows, is to try to draw one. You have to look at how the leaf joins the stem or wonder what those hairy things on the rose hip are. Even if you’ve grown the plant for years, you may not have seen these things.

I get bored with discussions of which paintings are art and which are ”just” science. If I turn away from a painting more aware of some essence of a flower or vine, I am more alive. That’s why these paintings should be on view somewhere — in a museum of art or science. Is it art or science? Sometimes, as in nature, it is both.

From, New York Times April 1997 read more here


Here is a detail of that beautiful beetroot, painstaking painted by Susannah Blaxill. Talking about it, at another more recent opening, Shirley Sherwood said
“She really is considered one of the very, very best. It took her months to do this painting, months. She said her family never wanted to eat beetroot ever again.”

I don’t think I should have put the beetroot in the same post as my plantain but she really is such a superb artist.
My three day stint seems lightweight compared with her months, my five layers of paint as nothing to her fifteen ..However I am just learning, so here is the inch by inch progress I am making. By lunchtime I was this far….


By three o’clock I decided enough was enough.. (you see.. lightweight!)
I am glad it’s done. I can’t quite yet say “finished” ..
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Water Plantain Final

Leaf of the Day: Ants, and Water Plantain, Day 6

Some time ago I wrote about repatriating some ants to Leu gardens which, I know, had arrived here in the Bulls Horn Acacia thorns. (reason here) Since then, Pedro gave me another beautiful thorn with, of course, a couple more of the caretaker ants. These I have re-homed in remote parts of the apartment complex but I seem to be stuck with one that won’t leave. I have put it outside now many many times but the next day it is back, so I give in and now seem to have a pet. I am not particularly fond of ants but my Buddhist leanings stop me just squashing it. There only seems to be this one at the moment so for now we have a truce. If the extended family arrive for a prolonged stay I may have to reconsider my largess.
It is a slender delicate little thing, extremely adventurous and fearless and spends a large part of the day running around my drawing table. I felt sorry for it the other day and gave it some honey which it spent all day eating. I didn’t see it the next day so presumed it was sleeping off a massive honey hangover, but today it was back.. it’s name is…Ant. It will feature in a painting soon and it’s quite nice to have this diminutive little companion for a while. Painting is a solitary business.
It has been scampering about all day today and has been a welcome distraction from watching paint dry. However it’s day 6 and I hope only one more day to go. I think it would be wise to stop anyway and get on with something else. I have made some mistakes and some progress but I always say that if you are happy with just one square inch of a painting it has been worthwhile.
I plodded on with the leaves but by lunch time I just had to get rid of the masking fluid. This may be a mistake, but I was just fed up with seeing the blue stuff and its sticks to your hand too.


Accidents?.. well 4 so far, one aphid which fell off my model and left a green smeary mark and 3 colour spots, one where I had paint on my hand. another where I dropped the brush, and the inevitable mystery one. All are on the parts of the paper which have to stay white .. but hey!..there is no point in worrying.
After another trip to find another flower head I started the stem. The green seed heads are quite a different green from the leaves.. really bright emerald but for this painting and in view of the comment the colours of my last submission I am keeping them subdued.
As I am writing this I have just noticed my other delightful studio companion, the house gecko. They are amazing aren’t they? Just like moving fridge magnets.. Hmmm …how compatible exactly are geckos and ants?

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Water Plantain, Stage 3

Leaf of the Day: Water Plantain, Day 5 , The Start

I did eventually get started on the finished piece today. It’s that first agonising brushstroke, that awful point of no return, and not really knowing quite where to start. Yesterday I read by chance of an artist who has to tear up and destroy a full sheet of pure white unused expensive watercolour paper before she starts to paint, just to get rid of the fear. Apparently ordinary paper won’t do! I really sympathise with that. With other less formal watercolour techniques you can get rid of the white paper quickly. Here you are trying to preserve it at all costs.
I tried a few different colour combinations first, (and did the washing up, hung the washing out,tidied my desk and made a cup of tea and even cleaned a shelf in the fridge…) In an attempt to be the purist and mix my own green, rather than use premixed greens, I have ended up with transparent yellow, indanthrene blue and light red but I can feel the need for some sap green coming on….

The early stages of the painting looked fresh and loose but the problems for me occur when I am trying to build up the detail. By layer 3 the freshness had gone and it gets to that middle stage, where it now is, of neither being loose nor detailed and looks like nothing.

I go back to the step by step book for reassurance and there is none (of course). I am beginning to think there is not one good step by step book in the whole world. They are wildly vague..
i.e. …”When the painting is still wet, add the darker green” …
Ok.. How wet is wet? Is it sloshing-about-the-paper wet? Is it still-shiny-in-the-light wet? Is it just-matt wet? Is it only damp-to-the-touch wet or is it really, nearly dry???
And just how dark is the dark green? How much pigment? How much water?
Just in that one casual sentence lie 500 possible traps and opportunities for your work to go horribly wrong.
And why are they always perfect? Can’t we have a proper step by step book where the mistakes are shown to encourage the pupil. It is, after all, the way most of us learn?
If I survive this course I have decided I will write “The Naked Truth Guide to Watercolor ” a step by step book, with warts and all.

While one layer of paint is drying I go back to another book, just for some inspiration and read about the problems that even very experienced artists have had. It is comforting, as I watch the leaves and flowers wither in front of me, to read Shirley Sherwood’s account of trying to commission botanical paintings of her favourite plants.
Streptocarpus did not enjoy being moved out of my orangery to be painted by Jo Hague and shed their flowers. The spathe of Monstera Deliciosa fell off in transit before Coral Guest could work on it and she had to wait weeks for another one to develop. Pandora Sellars had to paint her magnificent Blue Water Lily over two years as she could only complete the flowers during the first year and had to finish the leaves during the next season. “


Here it is, in Shirley Sherwood’s book “Treasures of Botanical Art”. No step by steps, just beautiful inspirational paintings.

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Water plantain. Stage 1

Leaf of the Day: Water Plantain, Draw, Re-draw,and Chinese Whispers

It’s Saturday and so there are other things to be done than paint the plantain but because time is short I am trying to devote 3 hours today and 3 hours tomorrow to it.
Warning! If you are not interested in the painful, laborious steps of my first proper botanical painting, come back on Thursday. It should be all over by then and I will be back to drawing my Soapberry tree and the myriad of exciting pods, seeds and bits and pieces waiting for me at the garden. If however, you are drawn to slow motion road crashes and the possibility of witnessing a pig’s ear in the making, stay with me.

I am at the stage where I have one drawing of the leaves and one drawing of the flower stem, some previous studies and composition sketches and … horror of horrors… the stretched, pristine, white and beautiful piece of paper to work on.
This is the first piece of work that I have spent so long on for many years. For a piece of botanical art things have to be carefully planned as there is little chance for alteration. I do hear of very experienced painters who seem to get started with the bare minimum of preparatory work but as this is my first, I am learning as I go.

Here are my hesitant steps.
Trace…
I have to get the drawing onto the final sheet now, so learning from Sandrine Maughy on the course I attended in May, I will trace the drawings and transfer them onto the paper. Why not just draw the design on the paper in the first place? Well, it’s a complicated subject and I need to rub out and correct all the time so I would have damaged the paper surface too much..much too much!! Also if you have them on two separate pieces of tracing paper, it helps to place the leaves and the flowers exactly where you want them. So I trace them. Here are the two drawings overlaid.

Transfer…
Having spent a long time thinking about just the right position for the leaves and stem I transfer the drawing using tracedown paper. Only the main outlines this time.

Re draw…
I now have faint thickish lines which I will have to correct and some of the very detailed parts, like the tip of the flowers spike, I will have to redraw in more detail.
So, this is the fourth time I will have drawn this flower spike. Am I bored? Very…also the tedious repetitious nature of this task means that things change a bit every time you re draw, the artist’s version of Chinese Whispers. I had written before about the unreliability of the old herbals which had been copied from earlier ones so many times that the plants became unrecognisable. There is definitely a danger of that here so when I come to paint I will have to check all the time with the plant and my previous drawings that I am getting it correct.

Masking out…
The next thing I want to get done today is masking out the white flowers which will sit in front of the green leaves. The white of the flower has to be the white paper and it will, I think, be easier to paint the leaves without worrying too much about the stem. I am not at all sure that I am doing the right thing, but I get the unspeakably smelly rubbery masking fluid out and blob it on my beautiful white paper as accurately as I can. It is latex and painting with rubber is not easy.
I have to say that the course is no help at all in ‘teaching’ you anything. You just have to muddle through on your own and read the books (which you have to buy), or try to find an (another) expensive course to attend. I personally find it very hard to learn from step by step books and because I have been a jack-of-all-trades commercial artist I have acquired some very bad undisciplined, slapdash painting habits, unacceptable in the botanical painting sphere.
But this is what I signed up to to do, to go back to basic careful observed drawing..and discipline!!…so I should just get on with it.
Here is my drawing board with the masked out flower heads.You can see the tracings and the grey transfer paper and, I have just noticed, in the background is my well deserved end-of-the-day glass of wine (bad old painting habit).. but the sun is well and truly over the yardarm now, it’s 8.00 pm and it is Saturday.

Colour Studies…
One last thing today, a couple of colour studies. Before I start the coloured version I need to test my colours and think about the colour balance and tonal values. Again, an experienced botanical painter will just know instinctively what colours to use. I don’t. And after the comment about my colours on the last piece I am even more unsure. Am I trying to match the colours accurately or be aesthetically restrained?.. a bit of both I guess. I did ask but had no reply.
The first sketch was a time saving, colouring-in of the combined tracings just to see what it might look like in colour.

…..11th hour changes.
All day I have been niggling about the crossed stems of the leaves. Now I know I don’t like them. They are just too cutesy and I have been influneced by too much looking at other people’s “designed” botanical painitngs where the plants are placed with design in mind rather than growth habit . Although they do grow like this I prefer them to be more static. There is enough wavy stuff going on with the flower stem. It means changing the design on the prisitne white sheet a bit but never mind, this is after all a learning process, she says defensively.
I was about to make a better colour sketch but that will have to wait till tomorrow. Instead a quick w/colour to try out this change. I think it’s much better and I can see where the problem areas are going to be.
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Plantain Colour Sketch

Why a Blog

Well, its that new-leaf-turning time of the year and I have decided to write this blog for quite a few reasons.

First and foremost… I decided to go back to some basics in art and take a botanical painting course with “the Society of Botanical Artists“. However I share with many the terrible creative “displacement behaviour problem” and so to discipline myself to produce some work, at least 2 days before the deadline, I am going to try to post a couple of images or more a week. The actual assignments for the course are only due bi- monthly and the lure of wandering the aisles of the local mall ( pronounced maul or mawl) in an attempt to put off the confrontation with paper and pencils is so strong that I may have to tie my leg to the desk. I can’t now remember the writer who had to do this to keep himself on track, but I sympathise… who was it?

Secondly… I am here in a new country and after 2 months have had some interesting experiences, have made some fascinating discoveries and have endless questions to ask. I will post a few of these online to help me remember what has happened and perhaps to get some answers to the questions. Unfortunately I cannot take a job here as the alleged “special relationship” between the USA and UK does not seem to extend to me doing anything useful positive and paid here… so I have to keep busy

Thirdly… It will be a sort of digital sketchbook too. I´m not very good at keeping sketchbooks as I have a haphazard grasshopper style of work which means I have odd thoughts scribbled on bits of paper. How I long to have those beautiful volumes of exquisite sketches that some artists have. I have faced up to many a lovely pristine sketch book with nothing but good intentions only to fail miserably by page three when the note or drawing I have done goes horribly wrong. I then have to either cut it out, or take the page out.. and that just leads to more dilemmas. …do I take out the whole page (and its connecting partner )..does that make the book look thinner or lopsided and.. worst of all …will anyone notice this deception and see and understand that I have made something less than perfect! ..etc etc.
Those who also have problems with perfection will understand.

Why this Course
Here in Florida, uprooted and missing the countryside of Europe it seemed the perfect thing to do. Engage with the local flora and fauna. I have always been in awe of the work of botanical and natural history painters, as much for their intrepid travels as for their work. Recording and rendering the natural world is a real challenge of skill and observation. It is also an honest and genuine art form with a purpose.
You may say why bother, as we have wonderful photographic techiques which can reveal more than the keenest human eye. But photography is instant and drawing in detail is slow and it is the luxury of going back to this slow and careful observation of what surrounds me that really appeals. In its slowness lies its pleasure. While you are drawing, ideas will emerge, connections will be made and the pure beauty of shape, line and tone will become apparent again. Already after only 4 days I have more notes in the “great-ideas which-may-never-see-the-light-of-day ” file. True! Most of them never will but it gives me some comfort to know they are there.

This painting course takes you back to the beginning of drawing again, careful observed drawing, then onto line, tone and colour. All the while keeping that disciplined approach, and the pace is slow too. I am so pleased to be part of it and this study will do nothing but enhance whatever other artistic things I am involved with. I also like to be part of something bigger and to have expert advice from some of the best botanical painters in the world will be wonderful. I admit I am daunted by their skills of observation, their design sense and sheer artistic virtuosity ..I have a lot to learn, but as learning is my drug of choice it wont be too arduous.