Story behind the art of Susan Tomlinson

Botanical Art Worldwide 2025-A More Abundant Future:

Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field

American Society of Botanical Artists at the Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, MO

Gossypium hirsutum 'Mississippi Brown'

The Mystery of Small Things

There is a tiny button of a bird called a brown creeper that I loved with all my heart before I ever even saw him. I loved him, in fact, because he was hard to see—diminutive, secretive, cloaked in camouflage so masterful as to be totally invisible against the bark of a tree. I literally searched for him for years, charmed by the shrouded mystery of his existence. When I finally spotted him outside the pages of a book, it was only because he flew right in front of me to land on a tree not three feet away…whereupon he immediately disappeared into the cryptic texture of the trunk.

I have always been drawn to small things. I prefer warblers to eagles, bicycles to trucks, pierogies to pies, hand planes to table saws, the pocket-sized to the palatial. Big things can be powerful and impressive, it is true, but there is special elegance in the efficiency of a small thing that does the job. It appeals to the side of me that believes in “just enough is plenty.”

I feel this way when I visit museums, too. You might say I go there looking for the brown creeper—the painting or drawing tucked into the wall that everyone else passes by on the way to take a gander at the Big or Famous. I saw one such “brown creeper” work in the Albertina Museum in Vienna one year. It was a small lithograph by an artist I’d never heard of, Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel, titled “Lawntennis.” I suppose nobody else touring the galleries of the museum had heard of him, either. There was a steady stream of art lovers walking from artwork to artwork, bending over to read the names on the wall, and I could always tell when they recognized the artist. They would suddenly straighten and step back to take in the drawing, or painting, or whatever, with “Aha! Yes, of course!” boldly written in their posture. But if it was not a name they recognized, then usually they would glance briefly at the work and move on. (To be fair, I looked up Herr Jungnickel in both of my nine-pound art history books when I got home to Texas, and they had never heard of him, either.)

I zoomed in like a bee, though, drawn at first by the size of it. If it is the size of a breadbox and a museum thinks it is special enough to hang on a wall, then there is probably some of that special grace of the small thing doing the job, don’t you suppose? At least, that is my thinking. I am hardly ever disappointed in these matters, and “Lawntennis” did not let me down. I stood in front of it for several long minutes (to my patient husband’s dismay), trying to parse the patterns of dappled light falling on two women in long skirts playing tennis. I noticed, too, that after a few minutes of peering closely at the lithograph, a couple of other people joined me. Perhaps they were like me and had an appreciation for the secretive magic of small things. Perhaps they were just trying to figure out why I was stuck in that spot.

I had this beguiling sense of mystery in mind when I decided to paint a series focused just on the bolls of different species and cultivars of cotton. When people think of cotton, if they think of it at all, they picture a fluffy ball of white. And for the most part, our cotton musings stop there. But there is so much more to the genus than that. In fact, there are over 50 species and countess cultivars, many of which most people would not recognize as cotton at all. There is delightful variation in the morphology, however, even in the component with which we are most familiar, the cotton boll. And given my attraction to small things, when I started a long-term project of documenting the genus, one of the first places I began was a series of paintings that focused on the boll alone, shown in the developing and open stages, and presented simply and with as much painstaking detail as possible. I deliberately chose to make the bolls life-sized, though making them bigger would have been easier for showing detail, and certainly more attention-getting. But I wanted to create a bijou prize there for those who stop to look. I wanted each paint mark to be a gem to find at the end of a hunt.

That is all why I chose to do the series of boll paintings. But I chose this painting, Gossypium hirsutum ‘Mississippi Brown’, to exhibit in A More Abundant Future: Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field because it is an heirloom cotton developed in the mid-1800s, prized for its colored lint, and still in use today.

 I planted the seeds in spring, harvested the bolls in fall, clipped them to my easel in winter, and painted their likenesses under a magnifying lamp, dot by layered dot, with a Winsor & Newton Series 7, size 000 miniature brush, on 300 lb hot press, extra-white Fabriano Artistico (do not ask me if it is old or new stock, because I do not know). The name of the cultivar was made with fade-resistant Daniel Smith walnut ink and an old-fashioned, virtually extinct tool called Leroy Lettering. If you are old enough (pre-personal computer) to have used Leroy Lettering in your work as an illustrator or mapmaker (which is what I was), you can appreciate how fraught with peril it was for me to dust off an old set to ink these names (especially since I am left-handed, and Leroy Lettering is a stubbornly right-handed tool). I inked the names after each painting was finished, and one slip could have ruined it all. Still, in a fit of nostalgia for my olden days, I chose to make things harder for myself in this way. Harder seemed fitting for a project that is, in good part, about making the extra effort for the small things.

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Read more about this artist's work: 27th Annual