Friday 30 November 2012

Press and the Media

Radio and Television



  • Interview (click to listen) on BBC Radio Devon about Sir John St. Aubyn aired 2008

Exhibitions  


Publications

Egelnick and Webb, 2015



The Joy of Plants, 2015



The English Home Magazine, Issue 117, October 2014


RHS Botanical Art Show, April 2014
International Dendrology Society Yearbook, 2015, Illustrations.





Saturday 13 October 2012

Chelsea Tulips

Did a bit more painting yesterday on both Monstera and Chelsea Tulips, but it was rather slow going! I guess I wasn't in the mood so it just took a little longer to get things onto paper.


 

I think maybe after one more day, this one and it will be finished. I am desperate to start something new if I am honest! I am finding this one still very tricky - the stripes, the highlights and the colour changes. Those petals have nearly ever single colour in them - oranges, yellows, reds, purples, pinks, greens and blues. The highlights are ultramarine to mauve in colour, which is really tricky to achieve as it requires only a light wash.

 

Been busy sewing again too and will post the progress I have made with this next time. I am off to see my mum soon which will be nice. It's hers and my step dad's wedding anniversary next week. It'll be nice to see them both and refreshing to visit the seaside.

I am now starting to think on what I can paint next after this one. Again I want to do leaves which doesn't really fit in with the title of the next SBA exhibition. I just seem to be attracted to leaves much more than flowers - I always have been and probably will always be!

Monday 17 September 2012



Rory McEwen
 The Colours of Reality 


 Tulipa by Rory McEwen © Trustees of the McEwen Estate

Upcoming exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Rory McEwen, The Colours of Reality will showcase the botanical work and other creative talents of Rory McEwen, ranging from the 1950s to early 1980s, featuring works loaned from his family and private collectors. His paintings will be accompanied by work by other artists who influenced him.
 
Rory McEwen’s Legacy

This will be a  supporting exhibition which will show how he inspired many of today’s artists in the Shirley Sherwood Collection.

 

Rory McEwen was ‘perhaps the most gifted artist to pass through my hands’ – Wilfred Blunt

Born in Berwickshire, Scotland in 1932 Rory McEwen began developing his natural aptitude for art whilst at Eton College. He had a talent to represent his botanical subject matter with scientific precision and artistic flair, and never compromised one for the other. McEwen had no formal art school training, but by the time he finished at Cambridge University his illustrations had been published in Old Carnations and Pinks by Charles Oscar Moreton, 1955. In 1964 he illustrated The Auricula, and painted many of the plates for Wilfred Blunt’s Tulips and Tulipomania, 1977. McEwen developed a distinctive style, using large backgrounds to float his objects on unadorned vellum, without shadows, and executed in exact, minutely accurate detail; he saw them as ‘plant portraits’, recording the imperfect and the unique as well as the flawless.

The exhibition will open at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in summer 2013 - dates yet to be confirmed. More information.

Saturday 16 June 2012

Ellsworth Kelly's Plant Drawings


Ellsworth Kelly might be better known for his hard-edged, bold canvas works such as this:


Spectrum colours arranged by chance III, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951 

Which I really like, (cross reference Meine Mandlebrotand would like one of these on my wall very much!  However, I read an interesting article in the Financial Times today that Kelly is also draws plants:



Kelly's drawings depict nature using as few strokes as possible, yet they remain representative. If you like tonal studies - this is not for you! Kelly doesn't do anything but create the line required - a simple, beautiful line. It's all about trying to get the essence of the plant across in a minimalistic way. This is something I have been trying to do myself. Not only to cut down on the time it takes to do a botanical study, but also because I believe that it makes the artwork look fresher. I am a believer in 'less is more'. 




I sympathise with the way in which Kelly describes how every one of his drawings has a story. Indeed they do, but where the story lies is often about the subject itself, which I think is often the case with botanical art. It's not about illustrating an event, or a feeling, or a scene, it's about personifying the plant. In trying to describe a plant with a pencil we are also perusing another line of enquiry - not just what it looks like. We are concerned about portraying it's essence or spirit, which is a very human notion. I find myself wondering if the essence of a forget-me-not is different for different people, and my reply is that it is - that's why people paint things differently, it's not just a question of talent or mood, it's do to with an individuals' make-up. So I feel that to give the drawing/subject a story is part of that personification. That's why I give my plants names. Often, the story comes afterwards, but in the end it's about how we interacted with that plant during those moments of exploration. 

I am delighted that Kelly will be showing his plant drawings after keeping them private for so long. I hope that they inspire lots of people to draw or at least give them a sense of how cathartic drawing is. It's a risky process marking a blank page, but if followed through with an experimental mind it can be rather magical.

Further reading:

Friday 13 April 2012

The Bare Necessities


In 1998, Wandersee and Schlusser introduced the term ‘plant blindness’. They defined the term as ‘the inability to recognise the importance of plants and the misguided ranking of plants as inferior to animals’. Plants can be viewed as the main mediators between the physical and biological worlds and play a significant role maintaining the climate. Therefore, it can be argued that plant blindness is a considerable hurdle to be overcome as we can assume that without sufficient recognition, it is unlikely that policies in plant conservation will be supported at a time when we need them the most.  

Book cover illustration - Onions and other vegetable alliums

While theoretical assessments of plant blindness exist, there has been little done to implement and evaluate strategies that directly address or alleviate the problem. Clearly, awareness of plants is advantageous for both economic and social reasons and that there hasn’t been a more appropriate time than now to improve our familiarity with the world’s flora and its uses.

The way we are living our lives causes the climate to change and critically endangers many natural habitats. Finding a solution to this has become a massive cross-cultural challenge. We have already taken substantial steps in addressing the crisis politically, but it is imperative that the issue does not just sit within the governmental and scientific arena, but that it becomes part of our social fabric. I believe that with imaginative, creative thinking we are able to design and cultivate a globally recognisable visual language. I therefore want to develop our existing knowledge and use of scientific visual statements so that we can design better policies and more globally effective forms of communication.




By implementing an artistic visual language to extend current scientific representation in botanical art, I propose that it is possible to realise a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to environmental awareness. 

The practice of early botanical art was first developed in medicine. Illustrations had an important role in herbals by transmitting information to individuals so that plants could be identified without the use of words. Through the means of observation, illustrations would depict a plant with its key features throughout an entire life cycle. More recently, botanical illustration has been used in many different fields of biological study and over time, scientists have developed strict guidelines for this type of illustrative work, creating a highly specialised visual language that is still used by botanists today. Although useful in science practice, I believe that this narrow view and use of botanical illustration, along with the ascendant use of photography, moves botanical art away from the aesthetics and spirit of our enquiry and has possibly contributed to its departure from mainstream media and the visual arts.

Fortunately, there are now botanical artists working to reverse this change who are questioning the traditional usage of botanical illustration. This can be seen through some significant contemporary changes in style and direction. An extremely apposite example is the 2011 piece by the artist Rachel Pedder-Smith, who presented an 18ft long painting using plant material from the herbarium at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. It illustrated the new biological classification system based on DNA sequencing and was a bold, beautiful statement about the advanced level of our scientific knowledge.

As a botanical artist, I am constantly exploring divergent approaches to observation in order to challenge the efficacy of our existing scientific language and to inspire people to think beyond their own interactions with botany. My intention for this project is to build a collection that utilises new techniques that have never before been applied in botanical art, so that I may confront our current perceptions of botanical art, its applications and how it sits within the larger scope of scientific communication. Additionally, I propose to analyse the psychological and cultural reasons behind the science-art divide and how this impacts society whilst researching how people can engage with more inclusive and harmonious botanical projects.

 Production of top ten crops of the world 

The culmination will be an interactive piece highlighting the global impact of the consumption of botanically based products. In 2012 I began a personal diary recording the origin and use of every single plant and its derivative that I consumed over a twelve month period; from food and cosmetics to textiles and pharmaceuticals. I recorded the quantity I used and logged the companies and locations involved in every plant’s distribution. I intend to assemble this historical data into a detailed and illustrated presentation that chronicles the manufacturing and distribution journey that commercial products make from their initial life cycle to the consumer.

In accordance with traditional botanical illustration methods I propose to paint a collection that depicts every species accurately and to scale. It is my intention that the scale of each species will indicate the quantity consumed and not that of physical size. This project has continually evolved since its inception and it builds on several years of previous work and research with plant collections. It will be original in its capacity to highlight and underline the connections between the mechanical and natural worlds and in its ability to challenge our current perceptions of botanical art and its use.  The project will deliver not only on the final collection, but also with an exhibition of all supporting research and the expected publication of papers in the relevant scientific journals.

References
·         Ackerman, D. (1992). A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books
·         Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press
·         Budd, M. (2003). The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press
·         Burke, E. (2008). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, New York: Oxford University Press
·         Carr, K. (2016) I had myself a nuclear spring. [Album]. Rivertones
·         Cohen, K. (2009). In the Blink of an Ear, New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group
·         Doyle, J. (2011). Mediating Climate Change, Farnham: Ashgate
·         Ede, S. (2005). Art and Science, London: I. B. Tauris
·         Fudge, R. S. (2001). Imagination and the Science-Based Aesthetic Appreciation of Unscenic Nature, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59(3), pp. 275–285
·         Hall, M. (2011). Plants as Persons - A Philosophical Botany, New York: State University of New York Press
·         McCandless, D. (2012). Information is Beautiful, London: Collins
·         Paterson, K., (2008), Earth-moon-Earth: Moonlight sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon, Oxford: Modern Art Oxford
·         Pedder-Smith, R. (2011) The Glow of Significance: Narrating stories using natural history specimens PhD Thesis, Royal College of Art, London, UK
·         Schneider, S. H. and Mesirow, L. E. (1976). The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global-Survival, New York: Plenum Press
·         Slough, D. L. (2012) Plant Blindness: An exploration and instrument development using the Delphi Technique MSc Thesis, The University of Florida, Florida, USA
·         Toseland, M. (2012). Infographica: The World As You Have Never Seen It Before, London: Quercus,
·         Trigg, D. ( 2004), Schopenhauer and the Sublime Pleasure of Tragedy, Philosophy and Literature, 28(1),  pp. 165-179
·         Tufte, E. R. (1990). Envisioning Information, Connecticut: Graphics Press
·         Uno, G. E. (2009). Botanical literacy: What and how should students learn about plants? American Journal of Botany, 96(10), pp. 1753-1759
·         Wandersee, J. H. and Schussler, E. E. (1999). Preventing plant blindness, The American biology Teacher, 61, pp. 84–86
·         Wandersee, J. H. and Schussler, E. E. (2001). Toward a theory of plant blindness, Plant Science Bulletin, 47,  pp. 2–9
·         Voegelin, S., (2010), Listening to noise and silence, New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group

Thursday 29 March 2012

Cigarette Cards


So while I wait a little longer before starting my new project I decided to visit my dad. While I was dads I was doing my usual clearing out and I came across a gift that my grandma's husband gave to me when I was a child. Finding this gift in amongst all my old books was like finding hidden treasure. The images were so delightful, I thought I'd share them with you all here. Obviously I won't be selling these!


My mum has been busy buying some botanically inspired postcards for me, and she has come up with some right gems. Since then I have been busy keeping an eye out for them too, but now I am also going to keep an eye out for cigarette cards with botanical drawings on. I wish we could do something like this again in the modern era. Such as when you get an app for your gizmo's you also get a free collectable card like this or printed pictures on the backs of till receipts. It's all about getting the art out there to me and cheering up the masses.  



 Daffodils (Narcissus pseudonarcissus)


A nice habitat illustration of Yellow Iris (Iris pseudoacorus)

Wednesday 22 February 2012

Dark Field Microscopy


When I was at Plymouth University I did some work using a dark-field microscope and these are the images I took by screwing a camera onto the apparatus. I really like these pictures. The microscope did all the work though. Who would have thought a Forget-me-not could be any more beautiful?!
Day off today. I wasn't planning on it -it just ended up that way. I think I need a day off from them to refresh. Will be back painting tomorrow though.



Forget-me-nots



Campanula

Thursday 16 February 2012

Basil (Ocimum basilicum)


One blunt F pencil, one sharpened F pencil, one normal B pencil and a very sharp 4B pencil used in this study

Monday 6 February 2012

More sketchbook pieces


Rosa sp.
Using 9B, 5B, B and F pencils - some blunt and sharp


Tulipa sp.
Using 5B, B and F pencils - all very sharp.

Saturday 4 February 2012

Runner beans and a postcard


So I have done a bit more sketchbook work. Tried to find some flowers to paint for the next assignment, but everything is pretty much dead, even the poor Daffodils that came out too early. So it looks like I may have to resort to the supermarket after all. Pity, as I prefer to paint things that I find. I did find some beautiful cherries in the frost all plump, semi-transparent, a burgundy red and juicy. They were surrounded by a thicket of cripsy, curled brown birch leaves. The contrasting sight was quite extraordinary and I really wanted to paint them. However, I worry I'd loose marks with there not being any flowers, so maybe that's for another day...



My mum came to visit me on Thursday which was lovely. She arrived with this postcard which she bought on ebay. It's a fabulous painting of a Narcissus poeticus. Both she and I like the grey-blue background. Oddly enough, she hadn't looked at the other side until arriving in London and on the reverse was an address to Bognor Regis. This was my home town (and her's one time). Don't you just love it when odd things like that occur? I do like a coincidence and a bit of serendipity.


Narcissus poeticus



Friday 3 February 2012

Another Magnolia

Work in progress

I'm doing lots of Magnolias to catch up on sketchbook work that should have been done for Assignment 2. Next: leaves. This is like time travel playing catch up.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Sketchbooks, Borris and a thank you

Magnolia sketch 30.01.2012 (work in progress)

So, I have been busy trying to get some work done, but as usual it's slow going! Sadly I have really hurt my left hip and left shoulder trying to get the work done and this is slowing me down. I am planning on seeing an acupuncturist this week to begin sorting it out. I think both are probably a mixture of some emotional blockage as well as a physical problem. Not sure if a drawing board would help. I was fine in Bali, all screwed up with a pad on my lap, then I return en Angleterre and bam! :(

My two notebooks - these make up the bulk of my sketchbooks. More writing than watercolour work! I found this much more useful than practice painting, but if I had the time I'd have done both. Here I am analysing other artists work, saying what I like, what I don't like and trying to learn from their mistakes. I think this is a vital part in all art work and feel that the SBA course needs more of this in its syllabus. In book one I am analysing a painting by Lilian Snelling before doing assignment five. In book two I am looking at a waterlily ready for assignment 11.

I also wanted to thank you all, as not only was January 2012 a bumper month for me (I had the most visitors I have ever had in a month), but I have also passed 16,000 visitors since I began this blog in 2009! I can't begin to describe what a boost your visits and comments give me - so thank you. I hope you find Inky Leaves a fun and inspirational place to visit.

Boris - I was going to post a picture of him after my work on Sunday, but alas my camera has just ran out of battery and I am not at home, so I will have to do this later. I am starting to work on the pale yellow flowers and am finding this a difficult task. If anyone has any tips for me, I would be grateful. I am using a greenish-grey for the shadows and am hoping that this will work.