STORY BEHIND THE ART OF DICK RAUH

17th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists at The Horticultural Society of New York

Mullein infructescence

Verbascum thapsus

The first impression you get from the infructation of mullein is of a long brown rod, loaded with capsules. The more I looked, the less this impressed me as a subject, and the mullein sat with my collection of dry fruits as I passed it over for more intriguing material. Then I looked more closely, through a loupe, and as often happens, it began to send out “paint me’ signals. I was energized to show the septicidal capsules, their unusual form curving in at the split, the slightly greenish background pubescence, and those few capsules opened into five armed stars. How to accomplish the feeling of both aspects, a column of fruits and the individual forms of the capsules, led to painting a section of the tall fruiting stem. As usual for me I felt obliged to enlarge the plant, both to make it easier for me to see and paint the details, but also to make what would be for most viewers a dull, forgettable remnant into an exercise of botanical revelation – the subtle, but present, interlocking Fibonacci spirals, the variety of stages in the two-parted capsules that split on the septum, and the subtle range of color.

My process involves first drawing an almost stick figure but accurate one-to-one drawing, setting up the model in a gray shadow box, lit with an Ott light. I tend to flesh this out, this time about three times up, checking the details through a magnifying lamp lens, and taking multiple shots with my digital camera to affirm the details. This drawing is enlarged to final size determined by the longest dimension that will fit on a full sheet of Arches 300 pound hot press watercolor paper, and again details and relationships adjusted, until a final single line drawing is traced to final size, and then painted. As always, a recurring theme in my work is the desire to make the viewer more aware of the less spectacular side of nature, and to find the hidden beauty available in even the most unprepossessing stages of a plant’s life cycle.

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Read more about this artist's work: Weird, Wild & Wonderful