STORY BEHIND THE ART OF LINDA MEDVED LUFKIN
22nd Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists at Marin Art & Garden Center
Sea Holly
Eryngium alpinum
In 2018 I was shopping with Marilyn Garber at our flower wholesaler for the subject of the next class I was to teach at the Minnesota School of Botanical Art. It was entitled Enlarging Scale & Format. I was to teach my students to use a gridding system and enlarge a small subject by three times, which would use most of a full sheet of paper. I was looking for a plant that would offer my students enough complexity and detail that they would need to be very diligent in ‘mapping’ out the placement of their lines within each grid space and achieve a complex, but obtainable challenge. When I found the bouquets of Sea Holly, Eryngium alpinum, I knew that I found something that would work beautifully for our purposes. I picked up a bunch and said to Marilyn, I like these, they’re pokey, like me.
If you didn’t know better you would assume that the Sea Holly is in the thistle family. With their cylindrical shaped flowerhead, an umbel, which is over an inch long and is surrounded by whorls of spiny basal leaves that are strikingly similar to the deeply toothed leaves of the field thistle, you can be forgiven. Though much, much smaller in size, the leaves are thin with generous spiny margins. Sea Holly is, in fact, in the Apiaceae or Carrot family and similarly has a long tap root. The tiny blue tinted flowers on the umbel are surrounded by whorls of sharp and pokey blue bracts which lie in the familiar Fibonacci pattern, adding to their similarity to the thistle. The tiny closed flowers have five, shorter, petals and five, longer, bent stamens with anthers tucked and hidden inside the petals. When the protruding central stigma is insect pollinated, the petals open and release the anthers, which pop out and release their pollen.
My gridded drawing developed as the class went along and it took a great amount of time before the grid went away and the complex drawing was ready to transfer onto paper for painting.
My painting is of a large single inflorescence in right profile sitting on top of a slightly ridged and sinuous sturdy stem rising up from the bottom of the page. The basal leaves are jutting mostly away from the upturned flowerhead but also out at odd angles and there is a whorl of small tangled leaves part way down the green stem that have the same characteristics of a bad-hair day as the basal leaves above.
When it was time to apply the paint, the leaves offered up a beautiful variety of color from a creamy greenish-white at the base near the flowerhead into brighter yellowish-greens and softer sage greens towards the tips. Each long thin leaf had a prominent light-colored main vein; some of the specimens we had in class had main veins tinged with a deep purple, but my specimen had little of this, keeping mostly to soft greens.
One of the more difficult but rewarding aspects of painting this piece was producing the feel that the bulk of leaves around the inflorescence had. This was achieved by taking advantage of contrasts in the layers and layers of leaves. Contrasts of soft and hard edges, subtle and aggressive value contrasts and also color shifts of pale washed-out green, brighter yellowish greens, dull mid-tones, faded gray-blues and very dark green punches when the leaves were shadowed. This effect presents the viewer with the ultimate contrast of all and the one that drew me to this subject from the beginning. The rendering of soft light and soft color shifts throughout the jungle of leaves invites the viewer to come closer and experience enticing intimate spaces; tension is then felt by being barred from exploring any further by the spikiness of the leaves. The invitation to come into the world of the Sea Holly and then the limits it sets up gives me the realization that I picked this subject because I felt a kinship to it, and maybe this painting is a more of a self-portrait in the end then I realized.
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Read more about this artist’s work: America's Flora