STORY BEHIND THE ART OF GILLIAN RICE

Abundant Future: Cultivating Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field

Tohono O'odham I'itoi Onion

Allium cepa

Each year, I see I’itoi onions growing in Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden. I was keen to enter the exhibition Abundant Future and preferred a subject to paint that I was able to grow myself. In my artwork, I try to focus on the plants in my Sonoran Desert garden. Immediately I thought I could try these onions. I bought 40 I’itoi onion bulbs from the nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH, whose mission is to conserve and promote the arid-adapted crop diversity of the Southwest. I planted my onions in the fall; by early spring, as they multiplied, I had many subjects.

In the late seventeenth century, Spanish Jesuit missionaries introduced a shallot to the Kino Missions in Sonora (Mexico) and Arizona. This onion became so significant to the Tohono O’odham (Desert People) that the name I’itoi (pronounced EE-toy) refers to Elder Brother, the creator deity in Tohono O’odham legends. I was thrilled to paint an onion of historic importance to the indigenous peoples in my region.

The I’itoi onion has small, mild, pinkish bulbs and slightly spicy greens. It rarely flowers and is propagated by bulb division. It is prolific, and I had no need to buy onions for several months.

When my onions began to shoot up long green leaves, I started to think about how I could choose which onions to paint. I checked on their progress daily. Some grew very quickly, and the leaves were so long that it was challenging to fit a composition with the whole plant on the paper. One day I spotted some onions with just the right length of greens and when I harvested them, they also had just the right amount of pink on their bulbs. I love that delicate pinkness and enjoyed painting it the most. The leaves had variety in the green, and some quickly faded and wrinkled. This gave the onions more character. Dried, crinkly leaves curled to embrace their neighbors.

I taped the onions in my final composition format on a large white card and stood this up in front of me as I worked. Where possible, I prefer to have the plant specimen rather than a photograph, but I do supplement with photographic references as these can preserve the subject’s original freshness. Fortunately, onions last much longer than some of my other botanical art specimens.

I use the drybrush technique, using dots and very tiny strokes of paint, as this gives me more control. A magnifying glass helps me see the edges of my painting. I also use a limited palette of five or six colors. I do not use white, and depicting the skins surrounding the leaves was difficult. I needed to show the green underneath the pale skin. A little experimentation helped me see that I could use an extremely pale mix of yellow and blue—almost white. Then I could put in slightly darker lines to give the impression of a skin with some color underneath. I do most of my experimenting with color on my artwork, which can be risky, but is not that hard to accomplish with my very slow, cautious drybrush. I test hardly at all on a separate “practice piece.”

This is the first time I have completed an onion painting. Previously I lacked confidence to portray the skin. But I was determined to succeed. I now have a special bond with these little I’itoi onions that love the desert as much as I do.

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Read more about this artist’s work: America's Flora