STORY BEHIND THE ART OF SUSAN PETTEE
15th Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists at
The Horticultural Society of New York
Sicilian Acanthus
Acanthus mollis
Why did you choose this subject to portray?
This plant has an unusual sculptural quality. It also has so many highly differentiated petals, lots of interesting veins which change size and layers of color upon color. And I was fascinated by the dissections.
I go to Sicily often, where I found it, but I haven’t seen it where I live in the US.
Did you face any unique challenges as you worked on this piece?
I couldn’t do the painting in Sicily with the live subject. So I got to know the plant well enough when I was there, did lots of drawings and sketches and made notes. I also took some photos as reference. Then I painted it on my return home.
What would you hope people would notice or appreciate when viewing this work?
I hope that they see the complexity of it, how simple the flower looks on the outside and how complicated on the inside. Also I hope they enjoy the dissections.
How does this work relate to your body of work?
It is part of a group of illustrations which I am doing for a book.
Tell me about your background.
I went to Radcliffe and took the only art class available in the curriculum, which taught classical techniques. Then after graduation, I went to the Boston Museum School for a year. I married and had kids. I took many classes on printmaking and did that for 10 years.
Then came a divorce and I went to law school, becoming an anti-trust lawyer for 25 years. I would doodle incessantly during meetings, so I never lost my drawing skills! I missed drawing and painting, so in 1999, I took a botanical art class at the Corcoran in Washington DC. I thought – this is wonderful – I can draw things that look like what they are!
A teacher at the Corcoran asked me to contribute to a book. Then I was accepted to the ASBA Hort show for the first time in 2001 or 2. I have been in the show four times now. My other subjects were an anemone, wintergreen from the Netherlands - a wonderfully luxuriant plant, and a Missouri primrose.
When I retired and moved to Paris in 2003 with my second husband. I couldn’t find botanical art courses in Paris, so I took the Eurostar to London and studied with Anne Marie Evans at the Chelsea Physic Garden. A college classmate lives in Sicily and when I visited her, I became interested in flowers there.
I did etchings in the past, before doing botanical work, but I stopped because the materials were toxic. At the opening reception of the ASBA Hort show a few days ago, I talked with Monika de Vries Gohlke about new, safer materials and she inspired me to go back to it. So I am looking forward to combining botanical art with my previous interest in etching.
Tell me about the appeal of botanical art.
What comes to mind right away is that I think people are becoming more aware of the environment, and of changes to ecosystems and climates which make some plants become rare where they used to be abundant and others move into areas which used to be too cold for them. Botanical artists make a record of the world of plants as it is now, what grows where and when, a snapshot in time. In addition, in my work in Sicily, I am finding what the plants look like which are mentioned in ancient legends and stories, for example, the asphodel and the mandragora, or mandrake.
I think botanical art is appealing to a wide audience because the subjects themselves are often beautiful and always fascinating and more intricate than they seem at first glance. Compared to, say, performance art or conceptual art, botanical art is approachable and yet appeals to our sense of wonder. You do not have to be any particular sort of person to appreciate or to make botanical art, nor does an artist have to feel he or she has a profound vision to disrupt how others perceive the world, as many contemporary artists feel it is their mission to do. Plants are intriguing enough by themselves. I also think that women's activities - and botanical art is now dominated by women - have become more respected and are no longer dismissed as just women's busy work.
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