STORY BEHIND THE ART OF SUSAN TOMLINSON
21st Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists at Wave Hill
Pecan
Carya illinoinensis
Pecan trees and their bounty have always been a part of my life. Around these parts, it seems like everyone has a pecan tree, or two, or five growing in their yards. While they are not native to the Southern High Plains (few trees are), they thrive here. In a landscape with triple digit summers, single digit winters, and little rain, grit like this does not go unnoticed. So we plant pecan trees.
My parents had a very prolific tree which every few years would produce over a hundred pounds of unshelled nuts. Shelling those nuts provided a lot of entertainment for them, all the way through winter and spring, and well into the baseball season of summer, where you could find them in front of the Cubs game on television, cracking and picking. By the time fall rolled around, they were packing up nuts to mail off to friends and family for Christmas gifts. At Thanksgiving my father would get a long cane pole and beat the branches of the tree to make the nuts fall, and thus the cycle would begin again.
An inveterate tinkerer, my father invented an automated sheller using a trailer hitch ball, a fan belt and gears, and an old lawn mower engine, just for the fun of it. It was goofy, and inventive, and completely over-the-top, and said so much about who he was that we displayed it at his funeral. Nobody who saw it could figure out what it was supposed to do. That pecan tree and its fruit meant so much to my parents that when each of them passed away, we buried them in caskets made from that wood.
From my upstairs studio, I am surrounded on three sides by the canopies of pecan trees. I watch them all year, noting their progress through the seasons. I celebrate the buds and new leaves, curse the catkins that create such a mess, worry about late freezes, and monitor the size of the harvest as it grows with either satisfaction or resignation.
The tree I have painted belongs to my dear neighbor, Nancy. As best I can tell, her tree is probably a Western Schley. I’ve asked some “experts,” and received differing opinions on this. So I’ve decided to go with my own opinion, based on the size and shape of the nut, as well as the age of the house in which Nancy lives and therefore what most likely would have been planted then. To me, it looks like a Western Schley, and so I’m going with that. I’ve painted it as accurately as I can, and so maybe someone who might know for certain can confirm or deny this for me.
I used mostly dry brush techniques for this painting. The climate here, being as dry as it is, just does not support delicate washes. Some days it seems like the paint turns to dust in the brush before I ever get it to paper. So, like gardening, it is probably best to work with the landscape in which I live, rather than against it. Maybe that is the secret to grit.
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Read more about this artist’s work: America's Flora