The Creators: A sense of place, Leslie Watkins at Dandelion Cottage

'We make the invisible, visible- my muse and teacher Frank Mason taught me that,” recalled Norfolk artist Leslie Watkins.

A pre-Raphaelite beauty herself, this master watercolorist, classically trained landscape painter, and Master Gardener sat in dappled sunlight on her deck, feeding walnuts from a jar to a friendly chipmunk, with her rooster Houdini crowing in the background. Her love of nature, painting the beauty that surrounds her, and creating landscapes en plein air (in the open air), inform the details of her life.

Years ago, Leslie purchased a small house in Norfolk with a lawn that slants directly down to a busy roadway. Now when approaching her magical one acre, one must search to find her house. Deep layers of trees, magnolias, apples, giant hydrangea blooms, and native species of flora and fauna create a labyrinthine series of pocket gardens, some dark with shade-loving plants and ferns. Leslie has become the landscape she paints.

She refers to herself as an “artistic descendant” of the Old Lyme Art Colony, which was the heart and soul of American Impressionist painting. The pantheon of Watkins’ artist influencers includes Childe Hassam, William Metcalf, and Frank Vincent Dumond. At the Art Students League in Manhattan, Dumond taught Georgia O’Keefe, John Marin, Norman Rockwell and Frank Mason. Watkins has exhibited her fine art paintings in the Columbus Museum, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the National Arts Club, the Salamagundi Club, the Union League Club, the Hudson Valley Art Association, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Lyme Art Association, and in Japan.

Her prolific commercial art career includes botanical watercolors and nature studies that decorate note cards, placemats, textiles, Battersea enamel boxes, and educational materials. Her illustrations appear on postage stamps, books, and magazines.

Watkins’ many clients include:

Walt Disney Co., Tiffany & Co., Caspari, B. Shackman & Co., Addison Wesley-Scott Foresman, Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Options, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, Rodale Press, Scholastic, Golden Books, Dover, Book-of-the-Month, and The New York Times.

A recent watercolor of the gardens at Dandelion Cottage by Leslie Watkins.Jennifer Almquist

Interview

Jennifer Almquist: Tell me about life in Dandelion Cottage.

Leslie Watkins: Dandelion Cottage is my tiny homestead in Norfolk designed as an experience in “living off the land” on just one acre. I named it Dandelion Cottage because I feel like I blew into Norfolk like a weed, like I didn’t belong here, and I loved it. I sent down this big, long taproot because I wasn’t going to leave. The seeds go off on the wind when I share my creative inspiration with other people. I don’t know where they go, I don’t know what they’re going do, yet I hope that they’ll carry on the tradition of this natural creative inspiration.

Small as it is, with the help of my cheerful and hard-working flock of Bantam chickens, I produce much of my own food supply in season. Honeybees help pollinate the fruits and flowers. My chickens live free range and eat bugs, scraps, seeds, fallen apples, small fruits and greens. They provide eggs, manure, and laughter. I have bred Bantam chickens (which are 1/5 the size of standard chickens) for 18 years, such as Bearded Belgian D’Avers, Seabrights, and Dutch Bantams.

My partner is an ethnobotanist. On our first date (thirteen years ago) at the Southfield Store, he talked to me for an hour about Heirloom tomatoes. His knowledge and wisdom are invaluable.

JA: You are a Master Gardener?

LW: Yes, I am a Connecticut Master Gardener. I have a certificate in horticulture. I design, renovate, and maintain gardens in Northwest Connecticut. Currently, I am creating a garden of native species alongside the Norfolk Library. I want children to be able to see the plantings from inside the library. My own cottage gardens are filled with flowers blooming in mass succession. There’s a fragrant white garden with cimicifuga, hydrangeas, phlox, a fringe tree and punctuated in autumn with blue asters. The central peony bed is filled with lush blooms in June. Old fashioned roses and butterflies are everywhere. My garden design illustrations have been published in Rodale’s Perennial Combinations and in Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Kitchen Gardener, and in The New York Times.

JA: How did you become a designer for Tiffany?

LW: The head of the Art Students League, Rosina, called me to her office. “Tiffany called- they want a studio assistant. I want you to get this job.” I had never done commercial work, but that night I put together a portfolio and trotted down to Tiffany design studio on 5th Ave. and 57th St, the most expensive property in the world at the time and went to the 9th floor design studios. Tiffany designed jewelry for kings and queens, for the aristocracy, and the White House. They hired me. I worked with 6 or 7 designers who specialized in different areas: jewelry, china, silver, and stationary. The designers, who did brilliant botanical designs, took me under their wing. I was hired by the International Philatelic Association in New York to create a series of stamps. Using watercolors, I designed a souvenir sheet of nocturnal animals for Lesotho, a series of food crops like mangoes for the Maldives, and a World Health Organization stamp for Uganda.

JA: Tell me about your early life.

LW: I’m a New Yorker through and through. My parents were born in Brooklyn and Queens. Generations of my family had a printing business, John B. Watkins Company down on 9 Murray Street, NYC. My parents divorced; my mother remarried when I was 10. I had a lot of adversity in my life, but I always kind of landed on my feet. I feel I’ve got a powerful Angel watching out for me.

When I was a little girl, around three, my mother and I went to visit my grandmother in Brooklyn. Aunt Flossie showed me how to make a box. I was absolutely mesmerized. I must have made fifty boxes. I just thought it was an amazing piece of magic. My father was a printer brought home reams of paper so I could sketch and draw.

I was an incredibly shy kid. I literally grew up in the woods with dogs, no other kids. I still don’t know how to socialize, truly. It took all my courage to sit next to this older girl on our school bus to watch her draw the most beautiful horses I had ever seen. I was enraptured. It made such an impression to see people draw. It was like magic to create something out of nothing. I was always an optimist who felt that if I could share my love of nature that it would inspire other people to love nature, develop a reverence, and help take care of it.

 JA: Now what are your plans?

LW: I want to get back to painting now. I got further and further away from my painting while running my garden business. Friends of mine who have gone on to be well-known artists wonder what happened to Leslie for twenty years. Well, I designed my Olana, like Frederic Church. Dandelion Cottage was never going to be an estate, but I knew it would be the cutest darn cottage it could. I was creating my life.

Now, I’m kind of scrambling. I must resurrect my career. I want to create a new body of work and a new audience. I can distinguish myself with watercolor. I have the credentials, the history, the background, and the ability. This September I’ll be teaching watercolor classes in the beautiful natural light in the Arcanum Building Annex in Norfolk. I’m also going to be offering some holiday paper crafting workshops, because now is the time to start getting ready for Christmas.

In part, I have modeled my life on the lives of Tasha Tudor and Beatrix Potter, who is my favorite. I combine my backyard sustainability lifestyle, my reverence for nature, with my artwork. I wanted it all to connect. I want to live an authentic life.