Talking to myself before I go for an injection.
When I was young but working, I worked in a draughtsman's office, I was a tracer doing very boring drawings of machinery. Today I asked what is a draughtsman, does it encompass the word artist for example. After all the ability to reconstruct something on paper that looks exactly like the image in front of you would surely be seen as artistic, and often we use the word draftsman (two spellings) in that sense.
I let a lot of artworks slip through my search machine, after all, now we have super duper phone cameras why do we need to sit down and paint. Yes there are a thousand answers to that! What we like or do not like is a matter of subjective choice. When the question came up about female botanical artists, who is your favourite, I can't name a name except perhaps Elizabeth Blackadder, and I am not entirely happy with her art work.
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| Elizabeth Blackadder |
Botanical art has to be exact to give you the structure of the whole plant, so there must be the flower, seed head, leaf and stem for accurate recognition. My plant book by Marjorie Blamey does that, with tiny little drawings of the various parts of the flower down the side of the margin. But her drawings never strike me as artistic. But by the same token I love Robinson's nineteenth's century 'English Flower Garden' for its steel engraved plates of their subject matter. I suppose such work denotes craftmanship? I also like Dutch paintings of flowers, more often than not set against a dark background, the vases often reveal a tumble of garden and wild flowers.
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| Rachel Rustch - 17th Century |
So I suppose it comes down to what you want to hang on the wall to give most pleasure and for me to delve into the history of botanical female artists as well. There is of course the American artist Georgia O'Keefe, but rather flamboyant.
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