True Bloom: About the artist. NZ House & Garden article
by Diana Dekker
Photographs: Paul MCCREDIE
Packed as tenderly as possible along with the frozen peas and beans in Sue Wickison’s freezer is a pohutukawa sprig, the fragile threads of the flowers rigid with icicles. The sprig has been in and out of the freezer since it burst into bloom last Christmas. Sue needs it for reference as she works on a pohutukawa painting as perfect as the real thing, a blaze of red glowing from the easel in her studio in Ohariu Valley near Wellington. By the time the painting is complete it will have taken more than six weeks of work.
Sue is not a Sunday flower painter. She did a four-year degree in scientific illustration at Middlesex University, London, and could have ended up doing detailed drawings of body parts for the edification of British medical students. She was attached to Barts Hospital in London for part of the course but painting the sometimes gory minutiae of the body was not for her.
Her passion for plants, however, was already well instilled. As a small child she had accompanied her father, an amateur botanist, on plant-hunting expeditions in Sierra Leone in West Africa where he worked for the British Colonial Service and where Sue was born.
After graduating Sue spent nine years as a botanical artist with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, working under some of the world’s foremost botanists. She graduated from grasses and sedges to legumes then on to the most spectacular plants of all – orchids – under the direction of Dr Philip Cribb.
At Kew each plant was meticulously drawn from pressed specimens – sometimes a century or more old – from Victorian collecting expeditions.
Hundreds of Sue’s drawings grace the pages of scientific papers and books put out by Kew, the Royal Horticultural Society (UK) and popular gardening and botanical publishers.
She was sent on a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to the Solomon Islands to collect orchids for Kew and discovered several new orchids including Coelogyne susanae which was named after her. There she met her husband and the couple settled in New Zealand twelve years ago.
Now their two children are teenagers she’s once again deeply involved in the painstaking work of accurately recreating plants and flowers on paper. They glow around her house – purple and yellow tulips, clear green orchids and elegant portraits of various New Zealand natives, all traditionally and finely detailed. New Zealand natives are her current focus. They’re a new challenge with their often quirky structure.
She eventually aims to illustrate a book on them as a national record of the unique flora here and to follow in the footsteps of Wellington botanical artist Nancy Adams.
Using photographs along with the living plant, she builds up layer on layer of watercolour glazes, each layer needing to be perfectly dry before the next is applied. She works from the lightest colours to build realistic intensity, leaving the paper white where she intends a light or highlight effect. She works with two sable brushes, one for paint and one for water to feather and smooth out the layers of colour.
She then uses a dry brush technique to crisp, polish and define the most minute details as she finishes the painting.
Sue is a member of the exclusive Society of Botanical Artists in the United Kingdom. There’s a society for botanical artists in Australia which she contemplates joining and a fledgling Canterbury Botanical Art Society in Christchurch.
There’s not, she says, a great understanding of botanical illustration in New Zealand. People don’t see it as a fine art. Realism, she believes, is not as much in vogue as abstraction. Yet when she painted at the Wellington Botanic Garden people were fascinated to watch her at work.
It’s a matter of educating people. And, slowly, she is.
Photographs: Paul MCCREDIE
Packed as tenderly as possible along with the frozen peas and beans in Sue Wickison’s freezer is a pohutukawa sprig, the fragile threads of the flowers rigid with icicles. The sprig has been in and out of the freezer since it burst into bloom last Christmas. Sue needs it for reference as she works on a pohutukawa painting as perfect as the real thing, a blaze of red glowing from the easel in her studio in Ohariu Valley near Wellington. By the time the painting is complete it will have taken more than six weeks of work.Sue is not a Sunday flower painter. She did a four-year degree in scientific illustration at Middlesex University, London, and could have ended up doing detailed drawings of body parts for the edification of British medical students. She was attached to Barts Hospital in London for part of the course but painting the sometimes gory minutiae of the body was not for her.
Her passion for plants, however, was already well instilled. As a small child she had accompanied her father, an amateur botanist, on plant-hunting expeditions in Sierra Leone in West Africa where he worked for the British Colonial Service and where Sue was born.
After graduating Sue spent nine years as a botanical artist with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, working under some of the world’s foremost botanists. She graduated from grasses and sedges to legumes then on to the most spectacular plants of all – orchids – under the direction of Dr Philip Cribb.
At Kew each plant was meticulously drawn from pressed specimens – sometimes a century or more old – from Victorian collecting expeditions.
Hundreds of Sue’s drawings grace the pages of scientific papers and books put out by Kew, the Royal Horticultural Society (UK) and popular gardening and botanical publishers.
She was sent on a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to the Solomon Islands to collect orchids for Kew and discovered several new orchids including Coelogyne susanae which was named after her. There she met her husband and the couple settled in New Zealand twelve years ago.
Now their two children are teenagers she’s once again deeply involved in the painstaking work of accurately recreating plants and flowers on paper. They glow around her house – purple and yellow tulips, clear green orchids and elegant portraits of various New Zealand natives, all traditionally and finely detailed. New Zealand natives are her current focus. They’re a new challenge with their often quirky structure.
She eventually aims to illustrate a book on them as a national record of the unique flora here and to follow in the footsteps of Wellington botanical artist Nancy Adams.
Using photographs along with the living plant, she builds up layer on layer of watercolour glazes, each layer needing to be perfectly dry before the next is applied. She works from the lightest colours to build realistic intensity, leaving the paper white where she intends a light or highlight effect. She works with two sable brushes, one for paint and one for water to feather and smooth out the layers of colour.She then uses a dry brush technique to crisp, polish and define the most minute details as she finishes the painting.
Sue is a member of the exclusive Society of Botanical Artists in the United Kingdom. There’s a society for botanical artists in Australia which she contemplates joining and a fledgling Canterbury Botanical Art Society in Christchurch.
There’s not, she says, a great understanding of botanical illustration in New Zealand. People don’t see it as a fine art. Realism, she believes, is not as much in vogue as abstraction. Yet when she painted at the Wellington Botanic Garden people were fascinated to watch her at work.
It’s a matter of educating people. And, slowly, she is.