STORY BEHIND THE ART OF DENNIS NOLAN

24th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists and Marin Art and Garden Center

Yellow Onion

Allium cepa

The yellow onion, Allium cepa, is my third botanical painting. I have enjoyed a long career as a picture book illustrator and an art professor, with deadlines and commitments taking nearly all my waking hours. I have always been intrigued by botanical illustration, collecting catalogues and books on the subject, dazzled by the details, colors, patterns, and expertise of the masters, past and present. My wife Lauren Mills, also a picture book illustrator and art professor, has long included flowers, fruit, and other plant life in her illustrations, and her investigations of ancient methods—painting on vellum, cutting goose quills for calligraphy, painting in egg tempera—have also sparked my interest in botanical subjects and in slowing down the process of observation and completion.

As a book illustrator I have painted everything from dinosaurs to fairies to tangled forests and flying horses. The world of the imagination is filled with magical and fantastic beasts, plants, and wondrous skies. The act of painting a single vegetable was a pleasant, meditative act that offered a chance to concentrate all my efforts on the beauty of a simple, observed object. A miraculous and splendid piece of nature. I quite enjoyed matching the form, texture, color, and detail before me.

What particularly excited me about my subject was the full sensory experience offered by the humble yellow onion. Our eyes take in the glowing beauty of the golden skin, the red veins illuminated from the backlight on a loose piece of skin. We feel the heft of the onion in our hand and touch the crinkly skin enveloping the globe. We hear the rustle of the papery skin and the squeak of the onion as we cut into it and slice it. Our sense of smell immediately takes in the fresh, raw aroma as our sense of taste anticipates the onion bubbling in the pan, adding its full flavor to the meal ahead.

I found the yellow onion at our local market, along with a red onion that became the subject of my second botanical painting. The two onions were preceded by a pair of Chinese lanterns. Each painting informed the one that followed, and by the third, the yellow onion, I was on a roll. I worked both from my own reference photographs as well as from life. I penciled the onion lightly onto hot press 140lb watercolor paper and worked in transparent layers of pale washes of watercolor.

Colors were laid down in a drybrush manner using stippling and crosshatching to build form and deepen values. I used tube colors squeezed into pans and let dry in a metal box, the enamel tray acting as my mixing palette. Using a split primary system, I rendered the onion with a greenish yellow and an orange yellow; next, an orange red and a violet red; and then a violet blue and a greenish blue, letting each layer dry, achieving the secondary colors of orange, green, and violet through the transparent layers. I used a red sable #6 brush throughout.

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