Susan Frei Nathan - Fine Works on Paper, LLC

Fifty spectacular examples of contemporary botanical art by the finest painters in the world are currently exhibited at the Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit, New Jersey.   Aside the paintings are magnifying glasses for closer inspection of the flawless dry-brush watercolor technique. The works embody the stylistic interpretation unique to the artists, mostly sharing knowledge of the plant in a classical plant portraiture manner with supreme elegance.  Shown in an historic estate on the Arboretum grounds with  beautiful gardens unfolding around it,  an ideal place to view botanicals both painted and alive.

Elizabeth Enders botanical drawings are spontaneously executed with serious intentions.  Enders new series of Petunias are über contemporary, appearing effortless and immediate, her unique stylistic interpretation comes from her long history of drawing and painting rooted in abstraction and language.  The artist’s ability to pare back the information she receives from the specimen enables her to produce sophisticated, clean drawings of plants, purely defining her approach to botanical portraiture.  Seeing a room of her botanical paintings hanging salon style conjures the feeling of walking through a garden at its peak with energy and motion.  They are contemporary to the core and alive.

Although Flora’s Lexicon, an exhibition on the “19th-century Language of Flowers phenomenon” is long over, it’s worth requesting  a copy of the Hunt’s Bulletin,Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 2011 which includes a well-researched essay on the subject by Catherine Hammond, Assistant Curator of Art and Research Scholar.

Summer, July 2011, Arkansas, USA. Visiting with Kate Nessler was a magical experience, the Ozark Mountains are exquisite.  Her most recent series of Edge paintings is derived from her organic planting style and the cut of her land.   Most of her subjects or inspiration for her paintings come from outside her windows and along the dirt roads leading to and from her sweeping landscape.

Throughout Kate’s home are small vignettes built around a beautiful object,  collections from trips (dried flowers, rocks) nestled around her drawings.  Exquisitely arranged like her paintings, they evoke wonder.

Please visit the blog of the Botanical Artists Guild of Southern California for a review of the lecture I gave on “Is My Work Salable” and Collecting to the Botanical Artists Guild of Southern California in April 2011. They have posted the event on their great site.

Recently I visited the studio of Monika de Vries Gohlke, a German born botanical artist who has applied the art of printmaking to botanical portraiture.  Monika works from real life specimens while engraving her copper plates from her home garden in Brooklyn as well as from inspirational plant-life found at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  Her work is infused with a European sensibility with a strong consideration for composition and romanticism, referencing the great German, Dutch and French 18th and 19th century master botanical artists.  Especially with the application of aquatint engraving, the dichotomy of sharpness in the line and edge with softness of subject constantly challenges the eye and feeds the emotions.  These are masterfully printed original works on paper with a unique stylistic interpretation, definitely contemporary and distinctly her own.