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35 | rollmagazine.com
ome things can be easily taken for granted. For instance, the camera
is a fairly recent development—no pun intended. Yet there are
libraries full of books on zoology and botany, with detailed images
of flora and fauna that have been pored over by students for
centuries. Somebody had to draw or paint those images, which—
though created solely for the purpose of reference and information—
often have an aesthetic beauty and resonance that transcend the
humble subject.
Yet, in spite of the ever-improving technology of the camera,
the field of botanical art is still viable and vibrant, as it becomes
clear that the artist brings so much more to the image than
a camera ever could. Hudson Valley-based botanical artist/
teacher Wendy Hollender is at the top of the field, with
works in numerous publications and galleries, including
a touring Smithsonian exhibit of endangered plant species. And
with her new teaching studio/organic farm just outside of Accord,
she’s teaching others to see inside the secret lives of plants, and present
them to the world.
It’s a rare person who in their youth decides: hey, I want to grow up to be
a botanical artist. As a child growing up on Long Island, Wendy certainly
wasn’t one of them, this whole lifepath blossomed out of….boredom.
“My career actually began as a teenager. In high school I doodled on
my notebook covers—I just liked to cover any available surface with
design and pattern. And I actually used those notebooks to apply to
RISD (Rhode Island School of Design)….and got in! I had no training, I
couldn’t do anything realistic. But I was really good with splashy color
and patterns, and I had no problem covering the paper with stuff.” Her
fellow freshman students kept asking her if she was majoring in textile
design, which she’d never even heard of, but after about the 20th time
it got mentioned she decided to look into it. Turns out it was the right
direction for her, her repetitive cover-the-page doodling style was, er,
tailor-made for textile design, so she went for it. She graduated, moved
to Manhattan, and went pro, soon racking up a solid client base: Laura
Ashley, Ralph Lauren, Wedgewood China, among others.
When she started out, splashy and contemporary were in vogue. But
as the trend went towards traditional and floral patterns, Wendy found
herself referring to older documents and drawings for inspiration. Then
she decided to take it further. “I began looking for a place to study
botanical illustration. I had gotten more and more fascinated with that
old-time skill as it related to my textile design, because I used these old
documents for reference. And I loved the way they looked, how realistic
they were, and three-dimensional. I could copy old documents or I could
work from photographs to do a kind of realistic floral textile design, but
I couldn’t (yet) work from real flowers and plants.” Fortunately, she
found the perfect place to study very close by: The New York Botanical
Garden, in the Bronx, had one of the largest programs for botanical
illustration in the world.
Learning the necessary techniques there—one-light source, perspective,
accurate realistic mixing of colors, plant structure and botany—brought
an realistic enhancement to her decorative textile work, as she began
getting her images directly from real plants instead of drawings and
photographs. After a few years of study she made her public debut,
producing a show of twelve large botanically-themed oil paintings. The
show caught the eye of a California calendar company, who purchased
the twelve, and Wendy had her first official botanical drawing job.
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