Painting sometimes is a series of mistakes if I haven't planned something out carefully. Thankfully, I was just doing this for fun. I've been smitten by the word "deliquescence" lately, ever since encountering the Coprinus comatus, or shaggy mane mushroom. I painted a 24-hour deliquescence of the shaggy mane mushroom for one of my Botanical Illustration finals in watercolor. Recently I did a mock-up of the shaggy mane deliquescence sequence (try saying those last 4 words 4 times fast 4 times over) juxtaposed with the actual word "deliquescence". For the best definition of the word, I refer you to the Cornell Mushroom Blog's explanation plus video. So based on the mock up, I wanted to paint this composition:
Part way through, I altered the placement of the different mushrooms and made a design error. Probably nothing apparent to the viewer but it screamed OH SHIT to me.
So starting with the shaggy mane mushrooms, I decided to keep going and experiment with filling the whole paper with mushrooms that deliquesce, namely the inky caps. At the other end of the paper, I painted a cluster of Coprinus micaceus, or the mica inky caps.
And in the middle, the Coprinus radians or orange-mat coprinus.
I thought the middle background was a little empty so I put in some Croprinus plicatilis or Japanese umbrella inky caps in the background. They're rather light and delicate mushrooms so I thought they would go well with the heavy deliquescence going on in the foreground.
The inky caps are really unique in that they deliquesce as a way of dispersing spores, meaning they sorta just liquefy and melt into an inky mess. This I discovered by accident. More than once, I held an inky cap captive in a paper bag and between plucking the inky cap from the earth and storing it in a paper bag for later examination, to running a bunch of errands for a few hours, to opening the bag at the end of the day, it has decomposed and stained the bag an inky mess. At Mushroom Maynia at the Burke Museum in Seattle, there were containers of inky cap ink for people to actually paint with.
I love them inky caps, despite their mess. And I am utterly fascinated by their tendency to deliquesce. So this watercolor composition became "Let's Deliquesce", an ode to the inky cap mushrooms. Oh yeah, it is also the launch of a side project, a blog on rootin' around town, with mushroom photographs (my new obsession) and such, called Let's Deliquesce, at http://letsdeliquesce.com. Please come visit and lemme know what you think!
