STORY BEHIND THE ART OF LUCY MARTIN

Weird, Wild, & Wonderful

Second New York Botanical Garden Triennial Exhibition

2014 - 2016

Violet Hedgehog Mushrooms

Sarcodon fuscoindicum

I have always been attracted to life forms that are strange or surprising. As a painter specializing in fungi, I have to love oddities! So this show seemed like a natural for me; almost everything I paint could be called Weird, Wild and Wonderful. But the Violet Hedgehog mushroom does stand out to me, because of its gorgeous color and uncommon form. It presented me with an irresistible challenge - a great example of the limitless creativity of nature that inspires my art.

Sarcodon fuscoindicum, the Violet Hedgehog mushroom, is not a common species, and I was thrilled to find it in an area of Coastal Live Oaks in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I love hedgehog mushrooms for their fascinating structure: instead of gills for spore dispersal, they have thousands of tiny spines under the cap (hence the name). This species has a deep violet color, ranging to brown-black on the rough, shingled cap and to gray-lavender on the spines. I also love the scaly tops of these mushrooms. They are truly weird and wonderful.

In my work I use mainly gouache, in combination with watercolor. The violet color in Sarcodon fuscoindicum is especially alluring, and also challenging. I painted many thin washes over the basic color to achieve a deep, complex effect. I often do this, painting layer upon layer to achieve the shading I want. I believe that the layering of paint creates a sense of depth and density which is appropriate for my very earthy subject matter.

I generally include a complete background in my paintings. I portray the mushrooms as part of their environment, in their natural setting of moss, leaves, lichen, tree trunks - whatever I find with them. I had painted an earlier version of the Violet Hedgehog mushrooms in which I did this. But the dark hue of these mushrooms meant that with their background of oak leaves and moss, it was harder to see and fully appreciate their wonderfully strange form. I decided to do a new painting for this show with a more minimal background, just suggesting their environment of Coastal Live Oaks, so that their beautiful deep color and fascinating shape would stand out more.

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Read more about this artist's work: 16th Annual International