STORY BEHIND THE ART OF SUSAN TOMLINSON

Abundant Future: Cultivating Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field

Early Cotton

Gossypium herbaceum

This Gossypium herbaceum was a research specimen in one of our university greenhouses. It bloomed and set bolls in fall and winter, which was fortunate for me, because the greenhouse was a rather hot and humid environment in which to work. Even so, I was only able to work on my preliminary sketches for an hour or two a session before it became too uncomfortable for me to concentrate. Though I was allowed to take cuttings of the bolls and leaves, the flowers are harvested for molecular analysis and I had to do most of my prep work on them in situ. Unfortunately, the light in the greenhouse was diffuse and uniform, making it hard to do good value studies. I took a small “daylight” lamp with me to create some cast shadows, and though it was hard to juggle that and my sketchbook at the same time, this worked pretty well.

The plants are also very tall, so to work on this plant at eye level, I usually perched on a tall stool or stood on a table. (This was not so bad—there was another species there for which I had to use a tall ladder to do field sketches.) I used a tall easel and a plein air box to support my sketchbook, and a watercolor kit for color matching. I carried these on my bicycle for the short commute from my house to the campus. The bolls and leaves I collected were easier to deal with, since I could take them home to my studio and put a strong light on them.

I have lived in cotton country all of my adult life, but before I started this project, I never knew what cotton flowers looked like, nor their strange, otherworldly bolls. In truth, I found the bolls to be the most interesting part of the plant; I think they look very much like a woman wearing a fancy hat. I also liked—and was surprised by—the gracefulness of the cotton plants, and tried to capture some of that in this painting.

G. herbaceum, or Levant cotton, is cultivated cotton that grows in Africa. Genetic studies suggest that it and another cultivated cotton, G. arboreum, found in Central Asia, are related to one of two progenitors (ancestors) of the modern elite cottons, G. hirsutum and G. barbadense. This “parent” contributed the “A” genome—thirteen pairs of chromosomes—of modern cotton. Another wild cotton species, G. raimondii, found in Central and South America, is thought to be related to a progenitor that contributed the “D” genome of modern cotton—with another, unique set of thirteen pairs of chromosomes. The modern elite cottons therefore harbor 26 pairs of chromosomes in their cell nucleus. How these distant progenitors got together to do this about 1.5-2 million years ago is still something of a mystery.

I do NOT have any sort of background in genetics, so it took me several tries to understand all of this. I am deeply thankful to Dr. Zhixin Xie for his patient help, careful editing, and for allowing me access to the specimens.

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Read more about this artist’s work: 23rd Annual