STORY BEHIND THE ART OF MONIKA DEVRIES GOHLKE

17th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists at The Horticultural Society of New York

Pumpkin

Cucurbita pepo

Late summer is usually not the time to go looking for botanical subject matter, but when I found this large, mottled, textured, lumpy, rough and wild looking pumpkin at my Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I knew I'd met a friend. The vines were still vigorous and flowers were blooming, so the whole story of the plant was right there in front of me. With the plant sprawling all over the place, it was an exciting artistic task to tame it onto a piece of paper.

I used my aquatinting techniques to show the varied surface of the pumpkin; I also added a very textured chine colle paper to the background to enrich the impression of autumn, harvest, abundance. Chine colle is a process that allows the artist to print with any kind of paper, thin, thick, textured, plain, in addition and on top of the standard printing paper being used. The use of an adhesive on the surface of the chosen "chine colle" paper glues the two papers together permanently during the printing process. Because there are so many beautiful and unusual papers to be found, Japanese, Indian, Nepalese, etc., there are no limits to the effects one can achieve with the use of these papers in printing. 

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Read more about this artist's work: Weird, Wild & Wonderful