Some unfortunate offerings for botanical art study have emerged amid the surge in online educational opportunities. One of these is instructors sending their own drawings to students to trace as part of a course on how to create successful botanical art pieces....
In March 2016, I wrote an article about Auriol Batten for the ASBA publication, The Botanical Artist. If you are unfamiliar with her name or work, Auriol was one of the most renowned South Africa botanical artists of her time. Her influence is still apparent today. My...
Sengmany (Seng) Phommachakr of Ottawa has just been announced as the first recipient of the ASBA’s Lizzie Sanders Memorial Award, created in memory of Lizzie Sanders, a widely-admired botanical artist who passed away in 2020. Seng’s work is outstanding and it’s not...
Realism is at the very foundation of botanical art. Ours is an informative genre committed to scientific accuracy with a high degree of detail. Anything less and it’s not botanical art. It’s inescapable. And the fact that it has to be achieved working with the...
It was at an exhibition in 1998 at London’s Tryon Gallery that I first saw Alexander (Sasha) Viazmensky’s mushroom paintings. Aside from the overall quality of the renderings, two things struck me—the less-than-perfect specimens and the seemingly random placement of...
