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Meanwhile, the textile business was getting stale for her, as
manufacturing was being outsourced, and product starting to lose
quality. Having already done extensive plant drawing at Riverside
Park—which Wendy lived nearby, a single mom raising two children:
Abby and Jesse—she approached the Park Commission with her folio,
and soon she had another client. This led to offers to travel workshops
in Nantucket, Hawaii, Trinidad, and the New York Botanical
Garden teaching colored pencil technique. Teaching was particularly
“empowering” for Wendy, who enjoys the demonstration aspect
immensely. Student demand for her personal step-by-step examples led
her to self-publishing a book. Using a top-bound notebook format—
with plenty of blank sheets to practice on—she takes the reader one
lesson at a time to the finished product. Its success led to publisher
Random House requesting a full-length book, Botanical Drawing in
Color, which came out July 2009.
Up until last February she was pretty happy operating from Manhattan,
drawing, traveling, and teaching, as well as working as a coordinator
at the Botanical Garden. “More and more I realized I didn’t want to
just visit the plants, I wanted to live among them. I wanted to have
my own place where I could do that and also teach it, because I
was frustrated with always going to these places to teach. Often you’d
go to a beautiful garden, and they’d have you stuck in a classroom
teaching. Why?”
Wendy had been making some trips upstate, visiting fellow botanical
artist and Accord resident Carol Woodin. A strawberry picking
session at Kelder’s (on Rte. 209, with the enormous gnome) started a
love affair with the area. “I started getting this vision that summer that
I needed my own farm where I could work, I could teach, I could have
an organic farm, there could be other things going on other than what
I did.” Pretty soon she was talking it up with friends and family, and
her two kids—now in their 20’s—were interested too. More trips to
Kelder’s, and a Rondout Valley Farm Tour sealed it; that day she fell in
love with the very road she lives on today.
But Wendy and her then-partner couldn’t agree on the concept—he
wanted a backwoods getaway, she wanted nature but to be near
town—and they split up over it. She went back to the real estate agent
the couple had been using, telling her “don’t show me these weekend
retreat places, that’s not what I’m looking for, I want to have a farm,
be part of a community.” She found the farmhouse/horse barn/
acreage she was looking for, and over the next year Hollengold Farms
came to full fruition, complete with fledgling organic mini-farm, and
the barn renovated into a multi-purpose building: gift shop, farmer’s
market, well-appointed kitchen, meeting place/lesson area, lodgings,
and Wendy’s spacious skylit upstairs studio, with an almost panoramic
view of the grounds.
The studio: a pair of drying kohl-rabi still on her drawing table next to
its rough sketch, straight from the late-season garden outside—which
is still producing kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, various cabbages.
Books of botanical photography, a large self-lit magnifying glass
and microscope, a full spectrum of German colored pencils, stacks
of durable Italian-made watercolor paper. Wendy shows me some
recent works, and they’re fascinating to see close-up. Finely detailed
line and charcoal drawing is seamlessly blended with the colored
pencil, which Wendy is somehow able to manipulate in a manner
similar to oil painting. And despite the need for precision and detail
of reality involved, “there is definitely very much an artistic side to it.
Composition is really important, which features you choose to show
and highlight. I do love scientific details, whether it’s for scientific