Compass plant, or silphium laciniatum, was my spark plant. I first knowingly encountered it in 2018 while wandering through the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Dixon Prairie during what I now think of as my Feral Grief Summer. I was reeling from loss and craving being outdoors, feeling the sun on my sweating skin, immersing myself in bird song, and generally avoiding people (it was good practice for the changes that 2020 would bring).
I rode my bike up to the Chicago Botanic Garden a lot that summer, and during one of my visits I was arrested by a prairie plant that seemed to look me in the eye. Around that time I had started to draw plants in a small notebook in what felt like acts of devotion, which was surprising to me since I didn’t grow up in any faith tradition and never thought of myself as a spiritual person. My drawing of this prairie plant, which I later learned was a Compass plant, is terrible (see it in the carousel below). But to me, this bad drawing marks a major breakthrough when I realized that nothing that I could create would ever be better than anything found in nature. So I dropped my portraiture and figure drawing studies and devoted my creative practice to botanical art and nature study. I haven’t looked back.
In early 2019 I started taking botanical art classes at the Chicago Botanic Garden so I’m happy to say that my plant drawing skills have improved, and it’s interesting to see Compass plant come up again in my sketchbooks throughout the past few years. Looking through these drawings, I can see the influences of artists I was studying at the time, or certain through-lines in my work. I’m finding this retrospection to be surprisingly fruitful. Maybe we shouldn’t always be looking forward when thinking about our creative work.
The last time I drew Compass plant was on an unseasonably warm Christmas Day in 2019 (see above). It seems like I’m about due to revisit the Compass plant in my sketchbook. When I do, I wonder what I’ll think about it when I look back on it a few years later. Maybe I’ll remember that I was newly inspired by the work of Helen Sharp, who produced several volumes of botanical illustrations between 1888-1910, and whose compositions seem to be echoed in the botanical drawings by Ellsworth Kelly, who died aged 92 in 2015. Maybe I’ll be relieved by whatever technical improvements I’ll (hopefully) have made in the intervening years. Or maybe I’ll just be satisfied that I’ve made botanical art a consistent practice, even if it’s just for my own contentment and I never make any income from it.