I haven’t done a purely botanical painting in ages. I think the last one I did was of Fringed Polygala back in 1999! I’m always painting plants as backgrounds for insects and birds, so they aren’t foreign; they just haven’t been the main attraction. I had enough fun with this one that I might have to do them more often.
The Greater Lansing Area Orchid Society Show is held annually on MSU’s campus. The opportunity to enter a piece in their art show inspired me to create this. The orchids in the painting include a mix of my plants as well as photos of show specimens from previous years.
My Uncle Joe is an absolute aficionado of orchids. Trips to his house often feature a tour of his greenhouse, which is packed full of spectacular, almost unimaginable specimens. In the bleak, frozen tundra of a western New York winter, it is always amazing to see the vast array of incredible flowers thriving in his house. He has green thumbs, fingers and possibly even toes!
I have always admired orchids, but for ages I was afraid of investing in plants I was likely to kill. Eventually my wife and kids bought an orchid for me. After a lot of online research and expert advice from my uncle, I now have a few that are thriving.
For this painting I wanted to do something really different. I did some botanical illustration when I was in graduate school for Medical and Biological Illustration. I’ve also illustrated a good number of mosses and moss peristomes. While those are interesting, I wanted to move away from a strict illustrative approach of a single specimen or holotype. I get enough of that with my day job doing medical illustration.
I was hoping to experiment with colors and shapes using magnified, almost abstract, details of various flowers. I also wanted to include a few full specimens to give a sense of context while avoiding the traditional image of a full plant with greenery and roots. To use a meal analogy, I basically wanted this to be “all dessert” and no main course. I played with designs for a few days, considering a design with an explosion of colors similar to my “critters” paintings. In the end I decided to go in a completely different direction.
Circles can make for interesting compositions. Most often I design within rectangular formats of some sort. A few years ago I spent a fair amount of time designing images for medals and coins. For those I had to balance text and bas relief images on an independent, three-dimensional object. When designing logos, I’ve often used round formats. With those experiences percolating in the back of my mind, I set about planning this painting. I wanted to do a bunch of related circle designs as well as arcs of color in a (hopefully) compelling design. I almost never work on white backgrounds, but that seemed to be the right choice for this piece of art. Most traditional botanical illustrations are done on white, so this is a nod to that history, though with a dramatically different tack. To break up the white areas, I added some arcs of color. This ties the other circles into each other while playfully keeping one’s eye moving through the painting. At least that’s how I see it. Let me know what you think.
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