If you visit @rosaliehaizlett on Instagram, you’ll find a celebration of watercolor. From sharp illustrations of creatures and plants to behind-the-scenes peeks at ongoing projects, the feed is packed with happy little projects peppered with pictures of Rosalie Haizlett’s giddy smile. It’s the kind of smile that can only be worn by someone genuinely excited to remind you how many shades of green they can pack into a single painting of lung lichen.
Rosalie has a knack for nature painting. She’s spent years commissioning prints and posters, freelancing designs and seeking long-term contracts for brands looking to add a home-made touch to their material. Now, she’s releasing her second book, Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains, that holds its readers’ hands through the bumpy Blue Ridge wilderness and beyond.
For those unfamiliar with the workload of an artist who decides to both pursue their passion and rely on it financially, it’s a lot. And the underlying philosophy of “do the work you have to so you can do the work you want to” might as well be embroidered on the pillow of every person with a pipedream.
It’s about as unique as the idea to hike the most popular hiking trail in the United States, the Appalachian Trail. But Rosalie had a better idea: explore the Appalachian Mountain Range in its entirety, roughly 2,000 miles from the first “blip” in the Cheaha Wilderness of northern Alabama to the rocky peaks of the Appalachian Uplands in Newfoundland, Canada.
“The Appalachian Trail is literally, like, three feet wide,” she laughs as we chat. “And I just feel like it gets so much hype. And it’s cool that it does because it is a really old, awesome, long-distance trail, but there’s just so much more to the left and the right of the trail that I think people sometimes miss when they get on this superhighway… and zoom as quickly as they can.”
Rosalie secured the finances for travel through the Eckelberry Fellowship and a West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History folk art grant. Though the trip would take six months, funding and planning alone took about a year. Once affairs were in order, Rosalie and her husband Ben set out from their West Virginia home “on a meandering six-month road trip along the spine of the Eastern Seaboard,” encountering enchanting plants, rock formations and creatures big and small along the Pinhoti, Appalachian and International Appalachian Trails.
“It was a road trip with lots of daily hiking,” she tells me. “My main goal was to take really slow, meditative walks and see what jumped out at me.”
The introduction of Tiny Worlds recalls a neurologist’s suggestion that Rosalie take “gentle walks” when confronted with chronic migraines. During these walks, her life began to transform. She saw entire habitats co-existing within our own. Tiny worlds, she’ll go on to call them. “I learned to observe my natural surroundings with a deeper awareness of and appreciation for even the littlest of details.” She publishes these words beside a unique self-portrait, one that poises herself among the landscape of her brush brimming from inside a jar.
I call the morning of another one of Rosalie’s persistent headaches. “Screen-time always makes them worse,” she tells me as she politely asks if we can treat our Zoom meeting more like a conventional phone conversation. I happily oblige.
And why shouldn’t the life of an artist be filled with headaches? Rosalie Haizlett is known for watercolor paintings of the natural world, but she has also pulled back the curtain on the less glamorous aspects of self-employed life and made it very clear that the amount of time she spends painting in woodland clearings surrounded by friendly animals is scarce at best. She typically chunks hours to paint among time spent on phone calls, packaging and shipping wholesale orders, scanning prints and stickers and doing a myriad of other chores she describes in a blog post titled Six Lessons from Six Years as a Full-Time Illustrator.
Artists like Rosalie support themselves through freelance projects. These short-term investments often pay the bills. Books, on the other hand, require a deep dive in order to surface, and publishers aren’t keen to risk segmenting their audience through concentrating on regional topics.
“One publisher suggested I make it ‘Tiny Worlds of the National Parks’,” she recalls. “I understood why they wanted to make it more marketable, because they’re trying to run a business too, but that’s what made me realize this is a passion project, and it’s not ever going to hit any best-seller lists or anything.”
Early on in the book, she describes an encounter in the Cheaha Wilderness of Alabama with a green anole lizard – anolis carolinensis – while it pauses as though to model for Rosalie. “My thighs burn as I hold a squat for many minutes,” she writes, “But I’m elated that this cooperative lizard is allowing me a full-blown photoshoot.” Suddenly, it pounces on a nearby beetle and drags it under a leaf to indulge away from Rosalie’s watchful eye.
After allowing the lizard some privacy, Rosalie concedes to curiosity and flips over the leaf. She finds that the creature has turned from brown to a vibrant lime green. Stunned, she whispers to Ben to come see for himself, only to find he’s fallen asleep in the time she’s spent in awe.
My conversation with Rosalie emphasizes her fascination with the natural world. It’s the throughline of her book, a mindfulness that generally stems from practiced patience. Years of slow walks, however, have made her effortlessly attuned to the tiny things we neglect. It’s telling when a person is so excited to talk about reindeer lichen, a puffy, mint-green moss that makes up a majority of any reindeer’s diet. Did you know they require around twelve pounds of food every day? Or that this specific type of lichen is prevalent throughout Appalachia despite reindeer migrating farther and farther north due to changing climates and urban development? Populations are so sensitive that hiking on their terrain requires a special permit, and even then, no such guarantee exists that any of them will make themselves seen to tourists.
“I only used my own reference photos, and I only depicted things that I personally saw,” she tells me over the phone. “That was totally a personal choice. I could’ve licensed a reference photo and included it, but for the sake of the story, I wanted it to really be true to my experience of hiking through, and then you just never know what you’re going to see or what you won’t see.” Luckily for us as readers, she encounters a mama and baby reindeer right as she’s preparing to leave their home.
Prominently displayed on the bottom left corner of the cover of Tiny Worlds is the eastern red-spotted newt – notophthalmus viridescens. This critter litters creeks and other boggy environments, especially “after a warm summer rain,” and their bright orange pallet draws eyes in both their natural habitat and on the bookshelf. Rosalie encounters them many times on her journey.
“They’re orange, and I have orange hair,” she laughs as she describes to me the kinship she shares with these creatures. “They’re small, and I feel kind of small.” But these pint-sized salamanders only glow this unique shade in their juvenile form. As adults, they adopt an earthy brown and live out the rest of their lives in the water. Rosalie tells me of the incredible adaptability they possess. Should their environment dry up, they can revert back to their vibrant teenage form and rejoin life on land.
“I think that’s a very admirable trait to just roll with the punches,” she says.
Despite their prevalence, these newts are just one of at least 150 unique watercolor paintings Rosalie features in her book, along with countless poems, facts, nature journaling tips and essays that read like creative non-fiction in her nature-journal-turned-published-treasure. The technicolor spreads range from creative cartography to close-up profiles of creatures like a lazy wood frog – Lithobates sylvaticus – as it loiters beneath a bright gold mushroom. Collections of “Trail Thoughts” sprawl paragraphs across lightly-stained pages, while ultrawide paintings, like a shallow wave crashing on a rocky northern shore, lay bare without words.
“I feel like I grew leaps and bounds just because I was producing such a volume of paintings,” she tells me. “I didn’t stick to one color scheme, and that’s kind of a rule of thumb for a lot of book illustration is to make things as cohesive as possible by having a specific color scheme, but for this, I just really wanted to capture the creature or whatever the subject was in a way that felt right in the moment. So the book is extremely colorful. Some people might not like that, but I think it’s fun and gives everything kind of a whimsical quality.” In a way, it’s the most natural step in her journey as a watercolor painter.
“For a long time, my paintings were very muted and very restrained because I didn’t know how to get really bold colors with just watercolor,” she continues. “It’s a very translucent medium, so you have to use lots of layers to get those bright colors. Every year, I get a little bolder and add more layers, and it’s been cool even in the last five years to see how my work has changed as I’ve gotten more comfortable with playing with my subjects.”
“Art has always been my voice,” she says, sheepishly. “I’ve often not really felt like, in person, I’m able to communicate the things that are on my mind or that I’m interested in because I feel I’m not a very talkative human.”
Even at 6 years old, Rosalie was drawn to watercolor as the only “grown-up” medium to which she had access.
“My grandpa was an oil painter,” she recalls, “and I was never allowed to touch his oil paints. So, I remember them telling me, ‘When you’re ten, you can try to play with the oil paints.’” She chose to stick with watercolors, at first making sketches in pen and gradually learning how to start with her brush.
“Personally, I’ve always been a very quiet person who likes to observe and take everything in on the sidelines,” she says, describing her preference to focus on “tiny things” in her work. “I think part of it is, even when you are kind of a wallflower, you want people to see you and notice what you’re doing and what you have to offer. I think a part of that has translated to a deep connection to the underdog in stories and nature and my social life.”
The grand philosophy that pervades Rosalie’s work could essentially boil down to this: we’re too self-involved. We need to slow down. Even someone like myself, who will occasionally hike the West Virginia wilderness of Dolly Sods, would find his entire worldview challenged in the Gaspe Peninsula of Quebec, where signs reading “Appalachian Mountains” are subtitled in French, and men in Carhartt jackets and work boots stand in grocery lines to collect fancy cheeses.
In so many ways, however, the culture of the rougher, rockier Canadian Appalachians echoes that of the rolling hills of the States. Rosalie describes to me the self-sufficiency of the homes she sees: well-attended humble houses with stacks of firewood and four-wheelers for transport. A fishing boat for each wind surfer creates a sense of balance.
She recollects encountering a huge Hispanic population in Chambersburg, PA, a town lined with Latin restaurants and native Spanish speakers. She talks about the evolution of food across the region, how she ate fresh shrimp in Alabama and relied on fish markets for sustenance in Quebec. She describes the music she heard in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, songs in bars and restaurants sung with simplistic throughlines by generations of Scots-Irish implants. Every one of these encounters rings thoroughly Appalachian.
Towards the end of her book, Rosalie finds “the most pristine place [she’s] ever been” in Newfoundland: the Long Range Wilderness, where no wide-scale industry has been developed.
“It’s like a big sponge,” she tells me. “The whole place is so full of beautiful crystal clear water, which made hiking a little rough because it was quite muddy.” Here, she documents her favorite leg of the journey, where only twelve hikers are permitted per day. Among the carnivorous plants and botanical beauties, the trails are unmarked. Rosalie and Ben rely only on a map and a compass to guide their way.
Amidst brisk mountain air and sprawling marsh mud, Rosalie is at home. The outdoorswoman inside her is drawn to the cool allure of autumn, and so is the bookworm.
“I like coziness a lot,” she beams. “It’s one of my main values as a person.” She describes her ideal cozy scenario, curled in a blanket by a wood fire with an herbal tea in one hand and a book in the other. She gushes about her 120-year-old house in Elkins and promises to send me the brand name of a company that specializes in thick, secondhand flannel shirts.
But the conversation very easily drifts back to books.
“It took me about three years from idea to publication, and two years of very intense work, and it felt like kind of a risk to dive very deep into something I don’t know if it’ll be profitable at all. But it’s fueled me so much, so I feel like I keep telling myself, ‘No matter how it sells, I’ve already won because it has given me the enthusiasm to keep doing what I’m doing.’”
Tiny Worlds of the Appalachian Mountains, Rosalie’s second book, is out now. It’s accompanied by a traveling exhibition with dates listed below at locations across the region.
Upcoming Exhibitions:
- Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences in Charleston, WV: August 31-December 8, 2024
- West Liberty University’s Nutting Gallery: January 15-February 12, 2025
- North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, NC: May 24-September 7, 2025
- Pittsburgh Botanic Garden in Pittsburgh, PA: March 6-June 21, 2026
