Botanical wonders celebrated as art in exhibit at Petaluma Arts Center

Centuries before the advent of photography, scientists and explorers relied on illustrations to record the wonders of the natural world.

During the Age of Discovery, from the 15th to the 18th century, artists traveled with explorers and scientists to exotic locales, where they collected specimens of unusual “new” plants and flowers and made finely detailed and botanically accurate illustrations for the scientific record.

Over time, these precise renderings inspired a new genre of fine art popular among the elite, who wanted to record the intriguing plants in their garden collections. Botanical artists like George Ehret and Pierre Doutes created glorious paintings of each plant within a particular garden and bound them in books known as Florilegium.

A Golden Age of botanical art and illustration between 1750 and 1850 produced a lush, visual legacy of nature rendered by brush.

A new exhibit at the Petaluma Arts Center will showcase the works of a new generation of botanical artists and illustrators carrying on the ancient tradition.

“Floribunda,” opening Oct. 16 and on display through Dec. 11, is a traveling exhibit of works from the collection of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The International Exhibition of Botanical Art & Illustration includes works of 36 artists from nine countries who work in everything from watercolor with gouache to relief engraving.

Three Bay Area artists also are included in the exhibit.

“This exhibition is designed as a source of inspiration and an invitation to see the natural world around us in distinct ways and to illuminate the relationship between art and science,” said Exhibitions Manager Kim Chigi. “With botany as one of the sciences, we are excited about the juxtaposition of traditional botanical illustrations with contemporary three-dimensional creations, working in tandem to explore the connections between the creativity of both artist and nature.”

David Powers, chairman of the development committee for the Petaluma Arts Center, suggested bringing the traveling exhibit to Petaluma, the land of Luther Burbank. Powers had seen the exhibit when it was on display in the Midwest and was so impressed he inquired about the possibility of arranging for a stop in Petaluma, said Val Richman, the center’s executive director.

One last stop

As luck would have it, the show had reached its last stop in August, so it wasn’t difficult to hastily arrange for one last appearance before the Hunt Institute brought the works back home.

“It arrived in three big crates,” Richman said. “It is all original work.”

The largest piece is 27 by 35 inches; the smallest is 16 by 20 inches.

Chigi said the collection of works shows an intimacy of artist with subject matter not seen in photography.

“They’re spending so much more time studying each piece and drawing cross sections of the plant,” she said.

The works are part of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt’s collection, a woman whose early love of nature and books grew into a lifetime pursuit of rare or historical works about plants, gardens and botany. Her collection came to encompass the people associated with those works, including portraits, letters, manuscripts and original artwork.

Two years before her death in 1963, she donated the collection to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. In the past 50 years, the collection has been expanded to include approximately 24,000 portraits; 200 archival collections; 29,504 watercolors, drawings and prints; 243,000 data files; and 30,429 book and serial titles.

The traveling exhibit is just a tiny sampling but is representative of a diversity of styles.

“Each artist has their own unique touch, a different way in which they apply pen and ink, some lighter and some heavier,” Chigi said.

She added that this is a rare opportunity to see the collection.

“The Hunt Collection is renowned,” said. “Quite honestly, I can’t remember the last time there was an exhibit of this stature on the West Coast from them.”

3-D flowers

Artists include Annie Hughes from the United States and Gael Louise Sellwood from England.

Bay Area artists who have been invited to contribute art to the exhibit include Aimee Baldwin, who makes three-dimensional paper flowers and mounts them inside wooden boxes, and Evan Kolker, who makes fanciful, vibrantly colored shapes, some of which are floral in nature.

The exhibit also will include three pieces from Randy Strong, a veteran glass artist from Sebastopol.

“Some of my sculptures do have a flower-like feeling and personality,” said Strong, who mastered the art of glassblowing over 45 years and now works out of a studio in Alameda.

His pieces are from what he calls his “Orchid Series.”

“It’s not an exact replica. Mine are more whimsical, fantasy, liquid flowing. They are flower images of my imagination,” he said. “The leaves come up around the stems. The flowers on the stems haven’t quite bloomed.

“It’s just my way of trying to translate the beauty of what I see into glass in a way that has never been dealt with before.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.