Botanical Art  Tags: drawing_plants plant_photography botanical_art  

Botanical Illustration is one of the oldest watercolor genres, associated throughout its history with the importance of plants to human health, recreation, and appreciation of beauty. Today it is one of the few art genres that unites watercolorists around the world in a shared love of nature and a common set of painting methods and pictorial conventions.

Retrieved June 7, 2009 from http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist01.html 

Perhaps more than any other genre, botanical illustration highlights this balancing act between truth and beauty, a balance that the best artists are able to turn to splendid visual effect. From the Renaissance down to the New Millennium, botanical illustration has remained one of the principal methods by which plants have been taxonomized, anatomized, and published in scientific references. Redouté's roses documented the advances in horticulture that created modern rose varietals from medieval plant stocks.

Botanical illustrators today are still called on to produce scientific renderings and naturalist field guides, even in an age of photography. Modern illustrators such as the late Margaret Mee are often known for their dogged exploration of jungles and back woods to collect, sketch, and paint rare plants.

Particularly amazing is the series of watercolors of the Australian banksia by Celia Rosser, integral to a scientific tome on this unusual desert plant. Her Banksia serrata(1995, 76x51cm) is rendered with incredible detail — every seed hair, minuscule flower part and leaf blemish is captured with an unwavering eye and infallible brush. Yet the overall composition, balanced colors, rhythmic curves of the leaves, and soft tints in the background are delightful in themselves, and succeed in transforming dry science into the purest art.

Retrieved June 7, 2009 from http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist01.html 

Rebecca Sewell Homan employeed 23 years by GSC.

Archivist, Bibliographer, and Associate Professor.

MLIS 1980, MEd 2007