NEWS about Botanical Art and for Botanical Artists

The 16th Biennial Art of Botanical Illustration Exhibition at RBG Victoria

18/9/2022

Yesterday the 16th Biennial Exhibition of The Art of Botanical Illustration (TABI 2022) opened in Melbourne, Australia.

Venue: Domain House galleries, Dallas Brooks Drive, Melbourne
Dates: Saturday 17th September and Sunday 2nd October 2022
Hours: 10am - 4pm daily
The exhibition is organised and presented by the Friends of the Royal Botanic Garden Victoria.

Below you can find out more about:

the exhibition
how to view the artwork and videos online
history of the exhibition
the awards for artwork
an associated exhibition - in a blog post later this week.

The hero image for the 16th Biennial (in the publicity images) is a beautiful and delicate painting of Grevillea rosmarinifolia, painted by Lioudmila Volodina. (At TABI 2020, her artwork Vaccinium corymbosum was purchased for The State Botanical Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.)

The Art of Botanical Illustration (16th Biennial)

The Art of Botanical Illustration exhibition is one of Australia’s leading and most prestigious botanical illustration exhibitions - and is held on a biennial basis.

It's been four years since the last exhibition - due to its biennial nature combined with the pandemic. The last exhibition - as highlighted in The 15th Biennial Art of Botanical Illustration Exhibition at RBG Melbourne was Online Only .)

All artworks are for sale and funds raised are used to support the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.

TABI this year is being held for the first time as a hybrid exhibition with

a physical exhibition at the Domain Galleries. This prestigious exhibition of native and exotic species is open daily (including public holidays). (see above for details)
You can also view the artwork ONLINE via https://tabi.rbgfriendsmelbourne.org/ - specifically:
- Gallery of Artwork in the TABI Exhibition - in alphabetical order of the artists' surnames
- Names of the participating artists and links to their artwork and profiles
- Vimeo Videos of artists and others talking about TABI stories the exhibition.

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The real woman behind this website

17/7/2022

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I got into botanical art because of my mother. The fact that this website exists starts with her.

Every year when I was young, Mummy always ordered an RHS Desk Diary. These had botanical illustrations at periodic intervals throughout the year. We were both intrigued by them and loved the illustrations of flowers, fruit and vegetables- particularly those by Redoute. Every year I looked forward to seeing her new one to see what new pleasures would be inside. Over time, once the diary was finished, plates were removed and inserted into frames and hung on the wall.

She also enjoyed art and I remember artwork she did for her local Women's Institute involving plants from every season. She was also very encouraging about my own artistic endeavours.

Then there was her love of plants and gardening and visiting gardens. As an adult, I lived in London and she continued to live in Cheshire. Most of my visits to her involved very long visits to plant centres, planting the garden and even longer visits to various gardens near her home in Cheshire. Latterly, as we both became less mobile together, we became very appreciative of gardens on the level - and rollators!

Nowadays I'm rather less mobile and mother (in her late seventies) is even less so. For those who like visiting gardens but have difficulty walking, Tatton is an excellent place to visit as it provides electric wheelchairs of the sort you see many older people now using to do their shopping. Mother whizzed around gravel paths and on and off grassy banks in one - she even managed the steep slope at the side of the Italian gardens! Fortunately I managed to persuade her to sharpen all my pencils for me before she started getting too ambitious!
Sketches from Tatton Park (June 2007) | Travels with a Sketchbook

I liked the way she always called plants by their correct Latin names and I now wander around gardens and identify plants as I go with names which just pop into my head. My knowledge of most of them can only come from listening to her over very many years.

As she became older and more arthritic, we devised new ways to garden at her home to take account of her mobility. I ran around uprooting weeds, pruning and generally licking the garden into better shape while she she sat in one spot filling the garden rubbish bin and making me cups of tea!

I saw her in June and spent some of my time moving all her big plant pots around so she had the best view of all the plants which were blooming just beyond the huge sliding windows which provided her with such an excellent view of her garden.

(She was tickled pink when my sketch of her garden (see below) was given the double page spread introducing section 2 "Deciding what to draw" in my book about sketching!)

A Cheshire Garden in July 2011 pen and ink and coloured pencil on Arches, 10" x 14" copyright Katherine Tyrrell

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Video: Illustrating the night time blooming water lilies

5/7/2022

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Lucy Smith at her desk in Kew - with a giant water lily bud she's just dissected

(below) Further to yesterday's post A NEW Giant Water Lily - discovered and illustrated by Lucy Smith, some of you may be interested in video of some of the challenges of illustrating water lilies

Channel 5 have been collaborating with Kew Gardens to create an excellent series called Kew Gardens - A Year in Bloom which aired for the first time last year 2021. It's about the work of the gardens - and the people who work within it - who of course include botanical illustrators.

Episode 3 included a section on the work of Lucy Smith, one of Kew's freelance botanical illustrators, and the challenges she has faced when trying to get specimens of giant water lilies to draw and then paint.

This YouTube video (below) - posted by Channel 5, is has been compiled from extracts from Episode 3 of their series and is called "Trying to catch the night-time bloom of the Waterlilies"

In it you see:

the Waterlily House at Kew Gardens - completed in 1852 and designed specifically to showcase the giant Amazon waterlily (Victoria amazonica)
the Kew Herbarium (where seven million preserved vascular plant specimens are kept) and the Library
Lucy Smith at her desk in the building dissecting a very fresh giant water lily bud - being careful to avoid the prickles - and then explaining how it works for the purposes of reproduction

and here's the bud - and you can see how big it is from Lucy's hand behind it!

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A NEW Giant Water Lily - discovered and illustrated by Lucy Smith

4/7/2022

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The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have today announced the publication of a paper about the discovery of Victoria boliviana a brand NEW Giant Water Lily. Moreover it is now officially recognised to be the LARGEST in the world.

Oddly, the newly-named Victoria boliviana has actually been sitting in Kew’s Herbarium for 177 years - alongside Victoria amazonica and Victoria cruziania..

A multi-disciplinary team of Kew experts - spearheaded by botanical illustrator Lucy T. Smith and Kew's tropical horticulturist Carlos Magdalena - have now revealed the plant to be new to science – the first giant water lily "discovery" in more than a century..

Lucy and Carlos with Victoria boliviana in the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew Gardens

The paper’s authors decided to name the species in honour of Bolivian partners and the South American home of the waterlily where it grows in the aquatic ecosystems of Llanos de Moxos.
With flowers that turn from white to pink and bearing spiny petioles, V. boliviana is now the largest waterlily in the world, with leaves growing as wide as 3 metres in the wild.
The current record for the largest species is held by La Rinconada Gardens in Bolivia where leaves reached 3.2 metres.

The announcement is of particular interest to botanical illustrators for two reasons:

the discovery was stimulated by Lucy Smith's major personal project to illustrate the giant water lilies at Kew - after she had illustrated the smallest waterlily in the world.
Lucy provided the initial important evidence to prompt a major scientific investigation by a team of people after she demonstrated that one of the waterlilies she was investigating, documenting and recording was actually different to the two known giant waterlilies, as illustrated by Walter Hood Fitch in the 19th century.

You can read Lucy's account of the project in her new blog post on the topic - which she has been writing for the last four years - and provides the botanical illustrator's perspective on this amazing story of plant discovery - see Victoria boliviana - a new species of Giant Waterlily | Lucy Smith Blog (4th July 2022)

Delimitation of the Giant Water Lily Victoria:
the Scientific Project and Article

The title and authors of the original research article "Revised Species Delimitation in the Giant Water Lily Genus Victoria (Nymphaeaceae) Confirms a New Species and Has Implications for Its Conservation"

So it came to pass that, this morning at 5am, a new scientific paper Revised Species Delimitation in the Giant Water Lily Genus Victoria (Nymphaeaceae) Confirms a New Species and Has Implications for Its Conservation was published in the journal "Frontiers in Plant Science".

This paper lays out the evidence for:

the discovery of the first giant waterlily of the Victoria species in over a century - to be called Victoria boliviana
the declaration of a NEW largest waterlily in the world.

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Young Botanical Artist Competition 2022: Call for Entries

30/6/2022

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There's a NEW Botanical Artist Competition for Young Botanical Artists - and this is about the Call for Entries.

The Young Botanical Artist Competition 2022 is being sponsored by Dr Shirley Sherwood in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

We believe there is significant talent among the 16-25 age group with a wealth of exciting work to be uncovered. This is a crucial moment to engage with the ever-growing genre of botanical art – the scientific capacity of botanical paintings and drawings to document plants and fungi is particularly vital in contemporary society as we work to preserve our planet’s biodiversity.

Summary of who/what/how to enter

Below is a summary of the "need to know" facts about the competition for those interested in entering. This covers:

Details of who can enter and what they can enter
Selection and judging
Prizes

PLUS Resources on this website

There are a few very relevant matters which are missing at the moment (eg entry form) - but I'm sure this will be fixed quickly.

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Plantae 2022: Exhibiting Excellence Awards

22/6/2022

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The Exhibiting Excellence Awards were introduced by SBA to highlight

excellent artworks in different media or
excellent artwork in relation to colour or composition.

The recipient receives a rather amazing Certificate of Exhibiting Excellence for their work

Exhibiting Excellence: Colour & Composition

Inspiring Use of Colour
Brassica (145) by Edwina Keene

I was pleased to see this award for inspiring use of colour. For me, one of the signs of whether a botanical artist is excellent or not is the effort employed in painting leaves and the quality of the result. Invariably only the best pay the same attention to leaves as they do to blooms. This painting is an excellent example of meticulous attention to the transitions of both colour and tone in the leaves of a brassica.

Edwina Keene has worked as a freelance illustrator for over 40 years. Her career has involved moves to the Middle East and Australia and her studio is now in the heart of the Blue Mountains near Sydney - next to a plot of land where she cultivates her plants. Her botanical/horticultural artwork has featured in various publications including ones by Harper Collins and Readers Digest. In March 2022 she was awarded the Best In Show at BASA's exhibition in Melbourne.

Inspiring Use of Colour
Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’ (34) by Youngran Choi

Youngran Choi (Korea?) also won the William Cowley Parchment and Vellum Makers Award for the best use of vellum with this painting. She's recently started teaching classes in botanical art. She's also focusing on an exhibit for a future RHS Botanical Art Show.

Most innovative composition
Acanthus spinosus (248) by Julia Patience

Julia lives in Tunbridge Wells. She graduated with a BA (Hons) degree in Visual Communication from Brighton Polytechnic in 1977 and subsequently worked as a magazine designer and illustrator in London. She moved to Hong Kong with her husband in 2007 and returned to the UK in 2012 and was awarded full membership of SBA in 2016 and is now a member of the SBA Council.

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SBA Plantae 2022: Certificates of Botanical Merit

22/6/2022

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This is about the Certificates of Botanical Merit awarded to artists exhibiting at the Plantae Annual Exhibition held last week by the Society of Botanical Artists

First the story of why the Society of Botanical Artists awards Certificates of Botanical Excellence.
Then how artworks are selected
Followed by the list of artwork and artists - and images - who received a Certificate in 2022. Links to websites or other related sites are embedded in the name

Two of the artworks awarded a Certificate of Botanical Merit at Plantae 2022

The SBA Certificates of Botanical Merit

The annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists is not a "strictly botanical" show in the same way that, for example, the RHS botanical art shows are.

This is because the SBA's founder Suzanne Lucas MBE FLS HPRMS PPRMS FPSBA HonSWA HSF BMS (1915-2008) believed very strongly that the portrayal of plants need not always be highly scientific and illustrative.

“To incorporate more recent techniques and styles in a broader interpretation; combining the scientific and representational, giving a rich and varied view of the wonderful world of plants.”

Consequently the SBA created the award of a Certificate of Botanical Merit in order to:

highlight the importance of drawings and paintings which are created in a botanical style - including some which observe the very precise niceties of scientific botanical illustration
for those botanical artworks in the exhibition which are particularly noteworthy in this respect.

The selection process

Recipients of a Certificate of Botanical Merit are selected every year by a wholly independent Judge who is well qualified in terms of their botanical / horticultural knowledge.

In recent years that person has been Lucy T. Smith GM BVA MVA

Lucy is a very experienced and multi award-winning professional botanical illustrator who produces botanical illustrations for publication by the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. Her work has been published in numerous scientific publications.
She has won BOTH
- the very prestigious Margaret Flockton Award in 2014 and 2017 (see Second Margaret Flockton Award win for Lucy T. Smith) and
- the Jill Smythies Award for Botanical Illustration, awarded by the Linnean Society of London in 2004 .
She also works as a botanical art tutor at Kew and elsewhere.

When judging the artwork for CBMs, Lucy is

not looking for a presentation along the lines of a strict scientific botanical illustration brief
rather she's looking for whether an image fulfils the brief of describing the plant accurately and well.

The Certificates of Botanical Merit in 2022

Romanesco (16) by Katy Bennett

Romanesco (16) by Katy Bennett (Graphite)

Katy Bennett graduated with a distinction from the DLDC in June 2022. She began to develop an interested in botanical art after the birth of her three children when she was seeking to rebalance her life. The precise realism she prefers fitted well with the scientific dimension to botanical art. She is adept in both graphite and watercolour and has been commissioned to provide the cover for the Autumn 2022 catalogue of the de Jager fine bulb company.

Rosa canina (no 21) by Pauline Brown (Watercolour)

Pauline was brought up on a farm and then married a farmer before becoming an audiologist. She started painting plants in 2012 and joined her village art group. She was taught by the late Jenny Jowett GM who was a founder member of SBA and a well regarded professional botanical artists

Pinguicula grandiflora, Large Flowered Butterwort by Shevaun Doherty

Pinguicula grandiflora, Large Flowered Butterwort by Shevaun Doherty PSBA, SBAF (watercolour on vellum)

Shevaun Doherty is Irish, one of the three SBA Co-Presidents, an SBA Fellow and a member of the Irish and American Societies of Botanical Artists. Based in Kildare. She has been painting in vellum for sometime. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and Ireland since 2014 and has won numerous prestigious awards. She's been using vellum for her artwork for some years and has been the Vellum Tutor for the SBA Diploma Distance Learning Course since 2015.

It's worth making a couple of points about the presentation of her artwork:

Unlike at the RHS (which likes plain white backgrounds), in this exhibition, gentle veining of the vellum is not a reason to downgrade a botanical painting from a botanical Illustration perspective.
Her artwork greatly benefits from being glazed with museum glass. If thinking about pricing above a £1,000 for a painting, serious consideration needs to be given to the implications of the quality of the materials used for both framing and glazing.

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