STORY BEHIND THE ART OF KEIKO NIBU TARVER

21st Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists at Wave Hill

Pineapple

Ananas comosus

Pineapple is a traditional subject for botanical painting and you can learn how to draw and paint it in many botanical painting textbooks. But I had never painted it. Maybe that is because I am not a pineapple person. When I was a child in Japan, only canned pineapple was available because pineapples do not grow in Japan. It was expensive and I liked it. I got used to its very sweet taste and soft texture. Later, when I ate my first fresh pineapple, I was surprised by its sour taste and fibrous coarse texture, which were beyond my imagination. Since then, I was not eager to buy and eat fresh pineapples. Also, many pineapples at supermarkets look similar and lack personality.

When I took classes by Linda Gist last year, I saw this pineapple, which was not picked by the other students, on a table. I was immediately attracted to the jewel-like colors of the body, which is actually a collection of individual fruits, and to its vigorous leaves, which are actually leafy bracts. It definitely had a personality and I wanted to express it.

It was tough for me to draw the fruit part and it took a long time. I followed the method to draw pineapples using two interlocking helices and Fibonacci numbers. But reality was not so simple as theory. Furthermore, the individual fruit’s surface structure was very complicated.

Once I got a good drawing, painting was fun. There were three key points for the painting. First of all, individual fruits have two different textures, one is a juicy part with the jewel-like colors and the other is a dry, fibrous texture. So it was important to express the contrast of these two textures. Juicy, jewel-like colors varied from yellow to green in the individual fruits. I carefully painted with a rather watery brush leaving the paper white for the highlights. As for the fibrous parts, I used drybrush technique to create contrasts among the fibers. The second one was how to express the powdery surface of the leafy bracts which expose the green parts partially. I used Cerulean Blue (PB35) for the first wash because of its characters of granulation and semi translucency. Then I painted with green. So I painted surface part first and then the under layer of the leafy bracts. The third point was the lower part of the leafy bracts. The overlapping of many small bracts shows the depth of the core part. The mixture of Mineral Violet (PV 23) and Permanent Orange (PO 62) creates various browns to show depth.

It was really fun to paint this pineapple and I enjoyed painting it for several months. The leafy bracts were kept in good shape by storing them in a refrigerator for a long time. But I bought two more pineapples for the reference. Of course, I didn’t eat them.

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