She began botanical painting in 1997, and jumped into it. She had met Jessica Tcherepnine through mutual friends who owned one of Jessica’s works, so she knew that the botanical art tradition was alive. Early on in her botanical career, she painted leaves. It was autumn and she would collect leaves while walking her son to and from his school bus, looking for really interesting fall foliage with subtle colors and insect damage, not the perfect specimen. Because she was busy with an illustration job at the time, she tucked the leaves into books until she had a short hiatus during the winter to work on this project. Painting the leaves “felt like I was painting their life’s history.” Jessica encouraged her when she saw her work and suggested that she join the ASBA at the time it formed. After only two years of botanical painting, she received the Best in Show award at the young ASBA annual exhibition at the New York Horticultural Society! She was self-taught until she took a week-long course with Linda Funk in Maine, and this opened her eyes to new techniques. She is recently retired from her day job and has many painting projects in mind.
Beverly is a serious vegetable and fruit gardener. Her gardens are a work in progress and she often chooses to grow plants which she knows she wants to paint. In the back behind the gardens, she has deep woods where she likes to walk, finding beauty and variety there. She tries to understand the differences in trees and plants, using books to help identify them.
She often does paintings of composite subjects. She was influenced by the borders of the late Medieval manuscripts which had realistically painted plants and insects, and by Joris Hoefnagel 1542-1601, an artist of the Renaissance, who created gorgeous compositions of different plants and animals for royalty. When she saw these, “I just changed my course”. She imagined Hoefnagel walking through the fine garden of a rich patron, gathering things as he walked, plants, toads, snails, and then entering his small room to paint. And that is what she has in her environment, in her garden and woods. She will choose a seasonal grouping of whatever is in bloom or in fruit in a specific two or three weeks, as well as the insects that coexist with them.
In the current ASBA exhibition, Beverly’s two works of different winter branches are very vertical, presented starkly, comparing all of their differences. Some branches are cultivated in her garden and some are native species in the woods. She sees a lot of color in these branches and that is part of the excitement – all the browns, purply reds, greys, a touch of green. She emphasizes the differences in structure, texture and buds, which are important ways to identify them. Her intention was to do two painting of the same size in which the tips of branches, all painted life size, would fit. In planning them out, she started with the umbrella magnolia, which she admires for its huge leaves and beautiful pink fruit which turns to deep red seeds. And she wanted to paint its distinctive green branch with the flame shaped tip. She had some other species in mind to include and some she just found in the woods. At times it was challenging to identify them in the winter, and she had to wait until the leaves appeared in the spring to confirm what they were.
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