STORY BEHIND THE ART OF WENDY HOLLENDER

21st Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists at Wave Hill

Cannonball

Couroupita guianensis

Who doesn’t admire the crazy cannonball tree? It is tropical and quite unusual. The flowers are really spectacular and exotic looking. And the giant cannonball fruits grow large and heavy all over these very tall trees.

I have been tracking the cannonball tree for 9 years at the National Tropical Botanical Garden* on Kauai. Ever since I first saw this tree in flower, I have wanted to study and draw it. It only grows in the tropics, and since I go yearly to the NTBG, I track this tree yearly.

I had never been there when these trees were flowering until this past year! I found some trees off the main garden paths, and one of these trees was in abundant flower. Each day I would trek through the wild boar paths to collect fresh blossoms and then hike back up the steep hill to the classroom where I would work on this painting. I was there with the NTBG Florilegium Group** and we worked side by side for two weeks. Having this knowledgeable and talented group of artists is very helpful and motivating when working on such a complex subject.

If you have ever seen a cannonball tree in flower you know how unusual it is. The structure is completely unique to this plant, the colors are vibrant and unusual, and the aroma is intoxicating.

The tree derives its name from the unusual fruit that develops. The fruits are large, resembling cannon balls. When ripe they can fall to the ground and split open, revealing a bluish green pulp, and smelling unpleasant. They are very tall trees. When you look up, there are hundreds of these large, heavy, cannonball looking fruits growing all around the tree. Perhaps wearing a helmet might be a good idea when walking under it! Imagine a very tall tree with hundreds of coconuts growing around it and you will have an approximate visual comparison.

 I started with the flower and since the complexity of the reproductive parts was so fascinating, I enlarged it by 2x. I took several flowers apart to study the stamens and the staminodes under the microscope, wanting to understand the complex botany of this plant. The reproductive parts remind me of a sea anemone or a seaweed like structure. I love the way the stamens each wrap around a curve down, creating movement. I also enlarged all the parts to draw separately. I wasn’t planning on including a fruit, as they are so large, but in the end, I couldn’t resist adding in a small, immature fruit, life size, at the top. So in reality the flowers are smaller than the fruit. Flowers are about 3 to 4 inches in size and ripened fruit about 8 inches.

 I normally work in a fairly spontaneous way. I find a plant I want to draw, take out a good piece of paper, hopefully big enough, and start drawing. Then I continue to add to my composition as I go. I don’t do any preliminary sketching or drawing ahead. I go right on the good paper with graphite pencil, and then colored pencils and watercolors. There was so much I wanted to show about this plant that truthfully a bigger piece of paper would have helped. Part of the challenge for me is to figure out how to build a composition with what I have, meaning the size of the paper I chose.

Once I had the flowers completed on the painting, I did several practice compositions adding additional elements before I drew them on the good paper. To do this, I take a photograph on my iPad of the painting in progress. Then on my iPad in a program called Adobe Photoshop Sketch, I use an ”I pencil“ to draw additional elements in the composition, drawing on top of the photograph of the painting in progress. These are quick rough sketches but they help to visualize composition choices.

In the end I kept adding to this composition because there are so many interesting elements on the cannonball tree. I love the fact that the flowers are so bright and mysterious, yet the fruit is a dull dark brown and fairly plain looking. I think I was attracted to the contrast between the flower and fruit and their unlikely transformation.

I see this painting as a part of my journey to continue to document and study plants that I can’t resist. I spend a lot of time with the plant I choose and over time they become like a close friend. I am happy that I got to meet the cannonball tree this way, and I know that I will want to draw it again!

Here is a great article about the tree from the botanist Scott Mori at the New York Botanical Garden. Scott has nominated this tree as the most interesting tree on earth!

https://www.nybg.org/blogs/plant-talk/2013/01/science/the-cannon-ball-tree/

*About the National Tropical Botanical Garden:

NTBG is a non-profit organization chartered by congress in 1964, with a network of five gardens and five preserves. We’re located in Hawai’i and Florida, with our headquarters and three gardens located on Kaua’i, one garden located on Maui, and a fifth garden located in Florida. Our gardens and preserves encompass nearly 2,000 acres with thousands of species gathered throughout the tropical world. Our collections contain the largest quantity of native Hawaiian plant species, many of which are threatened and endangered, and the largest collection of breadfruit cultivars in existence.

The mission of the National Tropical Botanical Garden is to enrich life through discovery, scientific research, conservation, and education by perpetuating the survival of plants, ecosystems, and cultural knowledge of tropical regions. We do this through our visitor programs; formal and informal educational programs; research in botany, ethnobotany, and horticulture; conservation and restoration projects; and through our facilities such the Sam and Mary Cooke Rare Book Library and herbarium.

 **About the NTBG Florilegium:

Beginning in the spring of 2016, a select number of established botanical artists were invited to participate in the creation of a new florilegium at NTBG. Our goal has been to bring together national and international artists to raise the awareness of botanical illustration in Hawai’i and especially Kaua’i, as well as to document the significant plants in NTBG’s living collection. It’s our belief that inviting artists to attend and work in a large open studio together fosters opportunities to share, learn from each other, and socialize as a group. While each artist works on their own pieces, the opportunity to collaborate and communicate with one another, as well as the knowledgeable staff at NTBG, fosters a creative and enriching environment.

 This last year’s participants included Asuka Hishiki, Akiko Enokido, Robin Jess, Melanie Campbell-Carter, Mali Moir, Catherine Watters, John Pastoriza-Pinol, Rosemary Donnelly, Jane Goldsmith, Esther Carpi, Trudy Rehbock, Geraldine MacKinnon, Ariel Ramseth, Veronica Fannin and Wendy Hollender. Some of the artists come early and work through the three weeks of botanical art classes that precede the Florilegium, others stay only for a week, and most stay for two weeks.

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Read more about this artist’s work: Out of the Woods