STORY BEHIND THE ART OF SUSAN PETTEE

Weird, Wild, & Wonderful

Second New York Botanical Garden Triennial Exhibition

2014 - 2016

Galls on Last Year’s Rudbeckia Stems

Rudbeckia sp.

I was taking an early evening walk with a local naturalist last summer to watch birds, when we came to a meadow punctuated by dried black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia) flower stalks from last year sticking up above this year’s tender green grasses and flowers. Many of these stalks had galls – rounded, swollen outgrowths caused by the insects they had sheltered. I was fascinated by the galls of differing sizes, some even double, one above the other. I picked a bunch of them to bring home so I could draw them. 

 When I returned to my studio, I laid the stalks down on a white sheet of paper in several different ways until I found the arrangement whose rhythms pleased me most. The stalks and galls were variations on a theme: some stalks were slender, others thicker, some bent at the galls, others almost straight. They had weathered in different ways: some were silvery, some quite dark and mottled. Most had little holes where the insects whose eggs had overwintered in the galls had escaped after hatching. They were ideal to draw in graphite because they were almost monochrome to begin with. Harder graphite has a silvery sheen, while very soft graphite is deep black. 

I hope that the viewer will appreciate the beauty of these rather ordinary things, subtly different from each other.

I did one other drawing specifically for this exhibition, an enlargement of a calendula seed head that I found in Sicily last May and that I thought was really strange - it looked like some sort of headdress Princess Leia might have worn in Star Wars! I also considered drawing a section of the trunk of a black willow tree in my back yard. There is a part of the tree where there are many swellings with strange little branches coming out of them and the bark’s rough ridges are wonderfully wavy and irregular so that they look almost like faces. I have some odd seed pods on dried stalks that a gardener friend brought me that I want to draw, too, though I am saving them for later because I am spending most of my time on illustrations for a book on flowers at archaeological sites that an author friend is writing.

Next Story

Back to List

Read more about this artist's work: 15th Annual International