One would think that after 30 years hiking in the Mineral King Valley in Sequoia National Park, Joan Keesey would have accumulated a complete life-list of California native plants. And yet, season after season, the Palisadian artist continues to be astonished. ‘It was years before I realized that this bush that I would pass at different seasons was actually the same thing,’ Keesey recalls, still somewhat surprised by the various phases of the California buckeye. ‘In summer, I’d see these trees that looked like they were dying’they looked awful. In spring, I’d see this tree bursting with white flowers. It was like fireworks!’ All these changes, all these botanical details, colors and textures become pigments in Keesey’s watercolor portraits of the wildflowers in the Mineral King Valley. And after she retired in 2005, she vowed to illustrate as many of these remarkable plants as possible. Keesey and her husband John have been vacationing in this glaciated valley in the western part of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for the past three decades. John spent his summers as a child in Silver City in the valley and introduced Joan to the wonders of the foothills of the Sierra, where in this short growing season, June through August, an astonishing number of flowing plants and shrubs spring to life. When both were working’Joan retired after 30 years as a computer programmer with Rand, and John as a neurologist’they would spend a couple of weeks in the summer at their cabin. Now, they enjoy these two-week intervals over several months. The cabin is modest; they power their stove and refrigerator with propane and bring all other provisions from their home in Pacific Palisades. Just arriving at their cabin on Mineral King Road entails an arduous journey of 25 miles and 325 curves from the junction with Three Rivers. But with the elevation, which may start at 1,000 feet at Three Rivers and climbs from 7,000 to 9,000 feet, comes a bonanza of different wildflowers that Keesey observes season after season with continued expectation. ‘The variety and number of flowers has changed very little over the years,’ she says, no doubt a result of no development and little human disturbance. The area was once threatened in the 1960s with the prospect of a massive year-round recreational development imagined by Walt Disney, which the Sierra Club and other opponents managed to stave off in court for years until the Disney company finally abandoned the idea. Keesey has painted most of her life, at one time enjoying copying Old Masters, many of which she had never seen except in photographs’a point that proved to be humorous in one particular example. ‘I was working from pictures so I had no idea of the actual size of the canvas,’ she says, citing ‘her’ Modigliani, which was twice as big as the original! When she became interested in painting flowers she took lessons at the Brentwood Art Center with her son, who was taking lessons at the time. ‘It was easier to take a class at the same time than dropping him off and picking him up later,’ she recalls. That son, Patrick, is an artist and lives with his artist wife in New York City. Son Timothy is in land management and lives with his wife and four children in Chico; daughter Erin and her husband have two children and live in San Diego. Detailed-oriented by nature and profession, Keesey says that computer programming and painting share similarities. ‘Both are involved with problem-solving’in the case of computer programming, rendering raw data into something comprehensible, and in the case of painting, depicting a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional piece of paper. I find botanical illustration far more satisfying.’ Unlike plein-air artists who paint in the landscape, Keesey works from samples, carefully noting that if there is only one flower on the plant, she leaves it alone. Not satisfied with depicting just one bloom, she concerns herself with the whole plant, noting all aspects of the flower, the seed pod, the structure of the plant and how the leaves are displayed on the stem. ‘I also try to show color variations because nature is not consistent.’ Following in the long tradition of botanical illustration, Keesey uses watercolors because they are portable and dry easily. ‘I draw several aspects of the plant with pencil on tracing paper and then I arrange them in some sort of context before transferring the collage to watercolor paper.’ She then applies a pale wash on the paper, which not only removes the sizing (coating) but also helps define the eventual highlights. Then she applies the watercolors, developing layers until she get the hues she likes. Keesey has always been interested in California natives, particularly after moving to the Palisades in 1970, and is quite content to find subjects in our local mountains. ‘Right now, I am working on California poppies and Premantia [Gerbera daisies],’ which, she hastens to add, ‘are not native to the Santa Monica Mountains.’ Along the way, Keesey has continued to refine her technique and has studied botanical illustration with some of the best in the field, including Lisa Pompelli at the Huntington, and Anne Marie Evans through the botanical illustration program at the Virginia Robinson Gardens in Beverly Hills. Evans is one of the most prominent botanical art teachers in the world, who developed her 5-Step Method to help students learn the skills essential to the process. ‘I like Anne very much,’ Keesey says. ‘She is very honest and won’t tell you it’s great just to say something nice. She has a wonderful eye and without drawing on your picture shows you the planes of a petal and how to get perspective. My painting is always better after a session with her than it was before.’ At her last session at Robinson Gardens, Keesey and a small group of local artists painted wisteria hanging over a door. One of these paintings will be chosen to be included in the Virginia Robinson Gardens Florilegium. Historically, a florilegia was a method of recording garden specimens before the advent of photography. Modern florilegia seek to record collections of plants, often now endangered, from within a particular garden or place. Prince Charles commissioned artists from all over the world to include in his two-volume set of his garden at Highgrove Estate. In 2011, eight paintings entered the florilegium contest at the Robinson Gardens and the work of Barbara Jaynes was chosen for the collection. It depicts the semi-double pink camellia that was Virginia’s namesake. Keesey is hoping her wisteria might be chosen to enter the pages of the florilegium. She has a feeling. A member of several professional organizations, Keesey has participated in numerous national and local exhibitions, including the ongoing exhibition, ‘Wild Flowers of Mineral King,’ at The Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants in Sun Valley, which runs through June 30. The private, non-profit organization was founded in 1960 to promote the understanding and preservation of California native plants. The center propagates a wide range of species and cultivars of the California flora for use in the home landscape and offers courses in the horticulture, botany and ecology of California native plants for the general public.
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