STORY BEHIND THE ART OF MARY ANN NEILSON
15th Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists at
The Horticultural Society of New York
Heritage Raspberry
Rubus idaeus
What is your personal view of the artwork, for instance in terms of media, colors, composition?
Well, this painting designed itself! The composition was right there.
This is the first time that I have used opaque paint in a botanical watercolor. I had to get the underside of the raspberry leaf right, and it didn’t want to work until I used an opaque paint, which gave it that chalkiness.
Why did you choose this subject to portray?
I have carried this raspberry plant from move to move, 7 or 8 times, over many years. I originally planted it outside our house in Brooklyn in a very narrow space, a 24” space bordered by bricks, so that it wouldn’t spread all over the place. I don’t usually plant fruits and vegetables, but it was a way to show my city kids, who are now fully grown, where food comes from. This particular variety has fruit twice a year and my kids were allowed to pick the berries and eat them.
I have painted it several times. Once I painted it blown up, so that all you saw on a full sheet of paper was 3 huge raspberries!
What would you hope people would notice or appreciate when viewing this work?
I hope that the berries look edible, that you just want to pick them off the page and eat them.
How does this work relate to your body of work?
I have a dual painting life. I travel a lot and paint foreign landscapes and sites on location, and I also paint botanical subjects.
I work quickly, but am always attentive to detail. When I am working on location, for instance in Florence, I will draw a tick mark with a pencil for one or two landmarks, like the Duomo, and then I paint everything else straight, without a drawing. Of course, painting plants is very different than painting landscapes; you are designing on a white page and every detail counts even more.
Over the years, I have painted hundreds of roses. I painted many from the Brooklyn Botanic garden, which has the largest selection of individual varieties in the country. A lot of them are heritage specimens, antiques or foreign varieties and many can't be found elsewhere any more. But I rarely paint roses now.....I think I got rosed out!
Flowers and plants are like portraits of people – the sassy little girl, the old man, they are all portraits. And I am always trying to portray the flower as a portrait. I think that watercolor works incredibly well for flowers. The light you can achieve with watercolor expresses the spirit of the life of the subject. Some artists do this with graphite or pastel. I think that it is very difficult to do so in oil, to reflect the light back to you, but some artists can. You have to know how to make the light sing for the artwork to be successful.
Tell me about your background.
My original degree was in theatre design. I participated in projects like staging “Parade”, originally a ballet, for the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Pablo Picasso had painted the sets and when they came out of storage, we had to renovate them. I liked it but I realized that I didn’t want to redo someone else’s artwork my whole life. After that, I worked as a corporate graphic designer, but the hours were much too long when I had children. It was then that I decided to be an artist.
I taught at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for nine years. When I first started teaching, I thought that I was going to tell people how to do it. As I taught, I realized that by having to explain the process to others, I actually found out how I worked. That consolidated what I had already been doing without really thinking, and it sped up my thinking process. I taught night classes, to people who had fulltime day jobs and who showed up for my class from 6-9 pm, two nights a week. They really wanted to paint. They would tell me that they wanted to paint like me, but I told them they should paint like themselves. They all had different ways of expressing themselves and I encouraged them to go along with their internal way of doing things. Many continued year after year and they progressed. A lot of botanical artists and scientific illustrators use art as a refuge, their own private little refuge, and I think that that is very important.
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