Exploring Botany. Botanical Art in the 21st Century is Poland’s first exhibition showcasing the phenomenon of today’s botanical art, both European and Japanese. We are showing works by modern-day artists in the context of the oeuvres of old masters of botanical illustration, Basilius Besler, Crispijn van de Passe the Younger, Jacob Hoefnagel, Emanuel Sweert, Elizabeth Blackwell, and above all Maria Sibylla Merian. These are complemented by Hiroshige’s and Watanabe Seitei’s ‘pictures of flowers and birds’, which engage in surprising visual and narrative dialogue with the European works.
Exploring Botany

The artwork in the poster for the exhibition is by Robert McNeill

Past Masters & Patrons
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Contemporary Artists
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46 artists from 21 countries submitted works in a time before the world paused.

Astoundingly, the total number of entries in 2020 reflected as a 50% increase on previous averages, with countries Bulgaria, Switzerland and Norway represented for the first time. Ink was far and away the most favoured medium for illustrating, with pencil a distant second of the traditional forms, while digital and mixed media continue their slow rise in the ranks.
Round Up of the entries received for the 2020 Award

Who can enter the Margaret Flockton Award?

Some of the illustrations from the Margaret Flockton Award 2020 - Flickr Gallery - click the pic to see more

What can you submit?

How to submit an entry

High resolution for judging and exhibiting:
- No photos of artworks will be accepted - scanned original works or digitally created images only.
- Ink line and stipple - Bitmap tiff @ 1200dpi
​- Pencil or Continuous tone - Greyscale tiff or psd (NOT jpg) 
(Colour files will NOT be accepted, please convert to greyscale) @ 600dpi (minimum).

Judging

Margaret Flockton Award 2021 Exhibition

Very good effort - but scope to improve
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Our digitally connected world is profoundly image led yet the practice of botanical image making, and types of image commissioned is little changed in several hundred years. Laurence Hill uses examples from the Fritillaria Icones Project, to look at structuring images for online use and wider uses within botanical science and science communication.

More about botanical photography
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More about Laurence Hill
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In simple terms I photograph plants and share them with others but by applying a set of carefully considered rules these photographs have a value which goes beyond this unassuming act. For more than a decade I have used digital technologies to explore new ways of recording and presenting botanical science and I am particularly interested in how a systematic photographic approach can produce new insights. Similarly how digital image ‘sets’ as voucher specimens will enhance and extend the value of research. We need to consider how we present, link and verify digital data and the Fritillaria Icones website is my contribution to this emerging field. 

Laurence Hill with his intensely botanical and extremely well presented exhibit of Fritillaria affinis and a discussion and demonstration of plant variability relative to the agreed taxonomic description of one species of a wild plant

Cyclamen intaminatum by Jenny Brasier (Cyclamen intaminatum) Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum

​A study by Jenny Braiser in the collection of the V&A Museum.
"This is a preparatory study for an illustration showing different examples of the cyclamen species painted for publication in the Cyclamen Society Journal. Having produced several working drawings towards the finished plate, the artist decided to record this process by transferring the original work relating to the colour forms of one species--the Cyclamen intaminatum--to a single sheet."
Study Room resource: Botanical illustration | V&A 

"Jenny Brasier is not a professional artist but was encouraged by Wilfrid Blunt and John Whitehead to draw and paint plants (Colour Plate 112); she excels at the portrayal of leaves (see the preliminary pages of this book)."
The Art of Botanical Illustration - page 300

"Jenny Brasier’s work is highly versatile and very beautiful with some of her brilliant, jewel-like watercolours on vellum having the intense quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts."
Shirley Sherwood

Cyclamen pseudibericum 1993 by Jenny Brasier - on a sheet of Rory McEwen's Vellum - exhibited at the Modern Masterpieces exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew in 2019

This film was produced for the Renaissance Watercolours display on until April 2021 at the V&A Museum

Sit back and relax as award winning botanical artist Lucy T Smith paints a watercolour of a pomegranate using traditional techniques.

Renaissance Watercolours - at the V&A Museum
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This display presents for the first time watercolour during the Renaissance as a unified art form, highlighting its versatility and pivotal role in understanding, interpreting and documenting the natural world.