STORY BEHIND THE ART OF dick rauh

25th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists and Wave Hill

Baptisia Pods

Baptisia australis

Over the years, I have lovingly acquired a group of relatives, close friends, and colleagues that know my peculiar tastes. They act as my agents and save the otherwise insignificant remains of plants that dazzled in earlier stages, because they know I will find beauty there.

This was the case with the Baptisia pods my dear friend Linda Thomas proudly showed me in her spent but crowded organic garden. The second she pulled them out of the tangle of greenery, I was taken by their textures, the various stages of growth they showed, and the perfect way they illustrated the definition of a legume. The pod is a simple dry fruit that splits on two seams and bears the seeds on the upper seam. Besides the book lesson that was there, the textures that the Baptisia creates to cloak its pods called out to me.

I had to paint them, and to best show the exquisite detail that I felt would be lost in a one-to-one rendering, I designed my composition so I could get as much as I wanted on a full sheet of watercolor paper. The painting, in tones of brown and gray, shows a twig with a few bloated pods in various stages of opening, enlarged about five times to show details. My process, a variation of the one taught to me by Anne Marie Evans, starts with a tea tint, then a strong interpretation of the form, and ends with meticulous dry brush. It was an intriguing challenge to treat the speckled, shiny texture of the pods.

The plant, as far as I am aware, is used primarily as horticultural variety, grown in the garden for its shrubby habit and beautiful, startling blue typical pea family flowers, and to a certain extent for its inflated pods, which are what attracted me. It is native to grassland and woods in the eastern and southern United States, and I assume it has the relevant nitrogen-fixing ability as do all members of its family, but I don’t believe it has their food value. It is neither invasive nor endangered (any more than all of us and our plants are endangered by the cavalier and near criminal way we are treating the natural world.)

The piece fits securely within my body of work, mostly enlarged versions of the later stage of dry fruit in the subdued palette that is my choice.

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Read more about this artist's work: 22nd Annual