STORY BEHIND THE ART OF ALANA VANDERWERKER

Weird, Wild, & Wonderful

Second New York Botanical Garden Triennial Exhibition

2014 - 2016

Crumpled Rag Lichen

Platismatia tuckermanii, Pinus strobus

When considering an entry for the Weird, Wild, and Wonderful exhibition, I knew that a lichen would be my choice. I specialize in portraying lichens because of my fascination with their seemingly infinite symbiotic forms and their varied existences and colors in almost every climate, from tundra and alpine to under water and at tide’s edge, all around the world. Most people generally ignore them, but I want to call attention to their crucial roles in the biosphere in addition to their beauty. As the eminent lichenologist Irwin Brodo writes in Lichens of North America, “Lichens play a significant role in nature almost everywhere they occur. They form the dominant vegetation over about eight percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface, fundamentally influencing the growth and development of other plants and animals sharing the same environment.” They amaze me; they are wild; they are wonderful. 

Initially trained in studio art and art education at the University of Maine and the University of Minnesota, I then lived in Europe. In 1979 I returned to Maine to write about art and studio craft history and to work as a watercolor artist, while earning my living as a copy editor at Maine Antique Digest. I have always been acutely curious about biology and botany while enjoying a rural lifestyle. In 2009, 2011, and 2012, I studied botanical art and lichenology at Eagle Hill Institute in Steuben, Maine, to further fuel my art.

My search for a rare blue lichen for this show became a quest. When I at last found two cobalt blue lichen specimens on the coast in down east Maine, I involved my lichenologist professors and reported my finding. Completing a greatly enlarged portrait on vellum of one of the specimens was enormously time consuming but totally fascinating to me. That portrait, however, was not the one the judges chose, thus I relearned an important lesson: any painting, botanical or otherwise, must itself be exciting in design and intriguing and engaging. 

I found the subject of the painting that was chosen while I walked on my usual path through the woods to Muscongus Bay in Maine after a huge storm. The old white pine trees had dropped some large branches covered with what is commonly called crumpled rag lichen. I noticed a stick that offered two handsome specimens together, one of which had a five-needle remnant of its host tree. I loved the lichens’ color when wet and pliable, a soft bluish gray, and the way the apothecia, or fruiting bodies (in this case the dark brown cup-like spore producers), arranged themselves on the black-rimmed edges of the mature foliose lobes.

It was late autumn of 2009, and that summer I had just begun to paint on calf and goat vellum. This watercolor was the third or fourth time I had worked on vellum, which I now prefer to paper (except when a specimen demands a texture or color I can get only with handmade rag paper, my longtime and previously favorite ground for my watercolors). Keeping to the color and form of these specimens, they are life-size. Crumpled rag lichens are not particularly rare but usually grow on trees higher than human-eye view. They are wonderful to enjoy in the wild and nice to contemplate in a painting. 

Next Story

Back to List