STORY BEHIND THE ART OF JOAN MCGANN

16th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists and the Horticultural Society of New York

Devil’s Tongue Barrel Cactus

Ferocactus latispinus

I want to share cacti with the world! I live in the Sonoran desert in Arizona and cacti grow in my backyard. They are all unusual and filled with detail. I am drawn to drawing their undulat

This particular piece is reminiscent of the first piece I ever had in an ASBA exhibit, with a long road in between! That first work was in the 8th New York Horticultural Society show – it was a colored pencil drawing of a Pima pineapple cactus, a frontal view of the cactus. But above the main drawing, I looked at the flowers and did an aerial view of them, the first time I had done that view. After that, I started doing pen and ink works of cacti from an aerial view. One of the reasons is that most of the interesting stuff is happening on the top! Like the beautiful interiors of the flowers with the changing colors in their hearts. And the fruits are on top. You can often see the Fibonacci sequence, which is so fascinating. The spiral is magic and I can’t get enough of it.

This work, the barrel cactus, is an aerial view of a large cactus and a small one. I often go to cactus nurseries to find subjects and then I plant them in my backyard. The big difference in this piece is that I started painting what I saw underfoot, the detritus on the ground. This one had grown a lot and all around it were rocks and skeletons of prickly pears and old leaves. So instead of just doing the specimen itself, I filled the entire composition with all of the surrounding elements on the ground, the cactus in colored pencil and everything else in graphite. I think it is the first of a series that I might do. For instance, the desert floor theme and then I might do the forest floor or the beach, compositions with the subjects in their natural surroundings. I am really falling in love with composing the whole page! I wasn’t sure how this work would be received, so I was thrilled to see it got in the show. 

I love working with a pencil. I have a degree in fine art in drawing. I had started out thinking I would do this work in graphite. But when I laid out the whole page, I missed the color. I didn’t think the specimen itself would be important enough in the composition. The color adds drama and information. The webby stuff near the barrel cactus is the skeleton of a prickly pear cactus that has cactus pads that are paddle shaped. When this cactus dies, it desiccates and what’s left is this structure inside that used to hold water. It is greyish brown and fragile. The barrel cactus grew under a palo verde tree, which is a native desert tree, and some of the leaves and seed pods have fallen onto the ground.

It takes forever for me to do a drawing and I couldn’t love that more. People ask how I could possibly stipple (in pen and ink) an entire drawing – a month or more per drawing. But that is fine with me. I am not prolific and I love spending a lot of time on something. I have yet to tire of spending more time!

I have just taken up sketching in journals. My husband does triathlons in beautiful places on beaches or in forests. So I take along a little set of travel watercolors and ink when I travel. I go to a lot of places and look down: you can find a place on the ground that has incredible things going on!

Joan McGann was also interviewed in The Botanical Artist in September 2009. And she wrote about creating Russian Matryoshka dolls in TBA in December 2012.

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