Story behind the art of Susan L. Tomlinson

27th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists and the Society of Illustrators

Mississippi Brown

Gossypium hirsutum

Some of the best writing happens because the writer brings all of herself to the page—her childhood, her parents, her landscape, her loves and heartaches, her fears and bravery. This is what writers are taught to do. The story you pen may not be about you at all, but who you have been and are now, is inseparable from the voice that tells the story.

I have thought about this a lot since I first started painting botanical art. I don’t think we talk about voice in art the way we talk about it in writing. We talk—nearly incessantly—about technique: what brush to use, what paper, color fugitivity, to mask or not mask. This is as it should be. Technique is paramount to craft, and it takes enormous time and commitment to master it. You cannot create art without mastering technique, and sharing technique with others is important to our own growth as well.

But I think that you also cannot create art without voice, though that may not be what we call it. For without voice—without bringing who we are to the page—what is the point of what we are doing? A writer tells a story because she must tell the story. There is something she wants to say, and she wants to say it because of who she is. Somewhat paradoxically, she tells the story because it helps her understand who she is.

Without voice, a painting is merely an exercise in technique. It is what the writing teacher Vivian Gornick would call the situation, and not the story. The technique may knock our socks off and make us yearn to have better technique ourselves, but the story can inspire us, cause us to feel compassion, make us weep when we recognize ourselves in it.

By now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with a watercolor of a cotton cultivar. The answer is…everything.

My mother picked cotton, nearly a century ago, in rural Alabama during The Great Depression. She was just a little kid, and the husks made her hands bleed. But her family was dirt poor, and their luck was even poorer, and the money was needed for food.

That was part of her story—probably a small part, for I can only recall her telling it once. The whole story of her young life was a complex tapestry of grinding hardship, resourcefulness, and determined optimism. And because she raised me, it became part of my story, my voice, as well. My mother was the kindest, gentlest person I’ve ever known, and she was also, hands down, the toughest. By comparison, in large part because of who she and my father were and what they expected of me and my siblings, our luck has been mostly good. But there are traits I can trace to both.

I am not as nice as my mother was, and I am certainly not as stoic and tough. But I do think I possess a soupçon of hardscrabble grittiness that I can attribute to her. I think that the landscape I live in also contributes to this, but that’s another story for another time.

I think finding your voice in painting is the thing that makes it your own work, and not someone else’s. So when I paint, I am trying to do it with this voice. I can consciously try to do it with technique—in this case using composition, the effects of atmospheric perspective to capture the harsh light in which the cotton grew, the drybrush I used to bring out the grittiness of the cotton, the unexpected softness of the cotton flower petals in comparison to everything else. What I hope is that my technique, informed by who I am, somehow magically reflects the side of me that is my mother, some hardscrabble grittiness, tempered with a bit of gentleness.

But the thing is, I can’t tell if my voice is there or not. That’s the maddening paradox of voice, isn’t it? We can’t hear ourselves when we speak. But the other paradox is still this: You tell the story not to hear your own voice, but because telling the story helps you understand who you are.

My mother picked cotton as a child, and once upon a time, she told me this story. This painting is for her.

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Read more about this artist's work: Abundant Future