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The centuries-old tradition of botanical art still blooms in Naples. If anything, the demand for it has bloomed, and the work of Naples artists Elizabeth Smith and RoxAnne Daly reveals the wide range of its contemporary applications

Both produce and sell traditional botanical watercolor paintings. Smith’s work has a distinct scientific, educational focus, while Daly applies her skills to porcelain arts.

Botanical art began with books detailing plants with medicinal values and evolved into use for purely botanical books, although photography is widely used in both today. Neither Daly nor Smith is concerned over the possibility that it or digital imagery will replace traditional botanical art and illustration, however.

Botanical art and illustration are now turning up in unexpected places such as fabric design, scarves, tiles, cookware, coasters, greeting cards, calendars — you name it. And it is getting its boost from technology.

No matter how modern we may feel, or perhaps because of it, “people still yearn for something created by hand,” Daly says.

Both artists, in fact, embrace new technology in their work.

Smith uses PhotoShop software to work out compositions, rather than the time-honored practice of layering drawings on tracing paper, and she keeps digital records of her work. Cameras record every detail, while the botanical artist’s scientific training allows skillful editing and clarification. In fact, clients have told Smith that she won bids over digital competitors for precisely this reason.

“One day, digital artists may be doing botanical illustration,” she predicts. “But they will be working from an intimate connection with drawing and observation, as artists always have done, not just from a pre-existing photograph.”

Daly treasures her notebook-sized computer, her “portable study board, “ which can be converted to a flat tablet format on which she can draw directly with CorellDraw software. A deft touch of stylus to screen is all that is required to change from drawing to painting, or vary line width.

Amazing though the software may be, it still requires the artist’s hand. For Daly, “technology is the handmaiden of the arts.”

Daly traces her fascination with botanical subjects to experiences in the outdoors with her father, while Smith cites hiking trips with her mother, from whom she also inherited a love of gardening.

Backing into art

Smith backed into her botanical illustration career. As an employee in the advertising division of the now-defunct Naples Star publication, she designed and illustrated special publications. One of these featured native plants on the site of Pelican Bay. Even though she did no illustrations for them, the one featuring native plants led to an “Aha!” moment. Eventually she was working with the Florida Native Plant Society and conservation interests across the state.

Her illustrations run the gamut from strictly scientific to T-shirts and even a cookbook published by Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Pen-and-ink work includes drawings for guides to Royal Palm Hammock and Long Pine Key in Everglades National Park, numerous illustrations for the North American Butterfly Association and material for the Collier County Museum and the Naples chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society.

Smith illustrated brochures on canopy trees and invasive plants, and the 48-page Pine Rockland Field Guide for agencies in Dade County. She also has designed signs for several state parks and created line art for the porcelain signs at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida in Naples.

Watercolor portrayals of poisonous plants for Home and Condo magazine, native orchids for Gulfshore Life, and wildlife and plants for the Conservancy’s guides to its Naples and Briggs nature centers rank among her favorite projects. Her experience in design proved invaluable when sHe got the jobs of illustrating a color brochure for the Bonnet House Museum and Gardens in Fort Lauderdale, and complex covers for both the Palm Beach Wholesale Growers Association journal and the Palmetto, the publication of the Florida Native Plant Society.

In 2007 Smith completed a coloring book including wildlife, habitats and plants for the Butler (Chain of Lakes), Fla., Conservation Association. In 2007 she also earned her B.A. in Fine Arts, with honors, from Florida Gulf Coast University.

Smith’s accomplishments and enthusiasm are all the more impressive given the fact that she also works full-time with her husband in their cabinetmaking business. She has taught botanical drawing in the past, and would like to do so again, particularly with children. She says she also enjoys exploring other artistic forms, especially that of assemblage, three-dimensional mixed media compositions.

From paper to porcelain

Inspired by classes from local artist JoAnne Lizio RoxAnne Daly began her artistic career painting landscapes in oils and acrylics. She had collected old porcelain for a number of years before she met Punta Gorda artist Wilma Manhardt, who has mastered many styles of china painting. Painting on porcelain “just clicked,” Daley said, and gradually it supplanted landscape painting.

She misses the genre. “But there’s only so much time,” she laments.

In 2002 Daley traveled with Manhardt to study at the State Porcelain Manufactory in Meissen, Germany, and she paints several weeks every year with porcelain master Alfredo Toledano Escudero when he makes teaching trips to the U.S.

What once was a student-teacher relationship has evolved into a close friendship. Still, Daly says, “I pay really close attention to everything he says.”

On porcelain, Daly does “everything from strictly botanical to fun and funky.”

She is currently first vice-president of Naples Porcelain Artists.

Looking for reality

While traditional porcelain painting often depicts plants in a very stylized manner, Daly began striving for greater botanical realism in her work, and began taking courses with internationally recognized botanical artist Marilyn Garber. The adjunct activity turned into a pursuit of its own, and Daly is now earning a certificate in botanical illustration from the Minnesota School of Botanical Arts at the Bakken Museum. She currently is illustrating native medicinal plants used to treat heart ailments.

For her, porcelain and botanical arts complement each other not only in subject, but also in technique.

In both, “ the strokes have to be very light, intentional, and loose at the same time,” she says. She is now also experimenting with the classical medium of watercolor on vellum.

Many of the most beautiful works by Western botanical artists through the 18th century were done on vellum, which is a cured and stretched calfskin. It requires a special technique, using details in shorter “hatching” strokes rather than with broad coats of paint.

In 2004 Daly was asked to contribute her artistic and technical expertise to a proposed creation of a botanically correct porcelain table service based on plants of northeastern North America. She jumped in with both feet, amassing two huge notebooks of correspondence and advice, only to see the project stall over copyright and financial issues.

That disappointment, however, has not stifled Daly’s love of porcelain or botanical art. In 2006 the American Society of Botanical Artists invited her to demonstrate her botanical painting on porcelain at their annual convention in Minneapolis.

While Smith and Daly both produce traditional watercolor paintings, Elizabeth’s focus on education and RoxAnne’s work in porcelain represent just two of the myriad directions in which contemporary botanical artists can go.