Botanical illustration is becoming endangered
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I don't know if anyone here ever used this, but there used to be a system called LineDrive [1] that would give you "napkin" directions instead of overlaying the directions on a map. It used to be on Microsoft's MapPoint but apparently decomissioned [2].
This was most useful in the time when you would print out directions instead of getting them dynamically, but I feel like there's still a place for it -- I don't need to necessarily know the details of every twist and turn in the road so much as a schematic overview, even when getting turn-by-turn directions. It would be great to see this revived in some way, because I think the representative maps are much more clear for most use cases.
[1] http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/rtmaps/
[2] https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remember...
But that's not what's happening.
Botanical art is still highly valued in the botany field because field conditions often do not allow a completely accurate replication of a specimen via a camera lens. In many cases, the only way to properly represent the plant in question, to a colour-accurate, detail-accurate degree, is by a drawing. Source: My mother is a highly qualified botanical artist and a member of the SBA.
As for them being rare, part of that is due to education and the infrastructure around it. When my mother was growing up botanical illustration or scientific illustration was not listed as even a potential career choice, and she wasn't allowed to take art and science at the same time as "that wouldn't be realistic". Obviously things have changed since then but given that so few artists even recognise it as a career choice has an impact on the number of people who decide to go down that path.
It's like how the UK is running out of high quality vellum, used for legal paper and archiving, because nobody realises it's a viable career choice for them to do. There's literally a free, funded apprenticeship to do it, because they need people to do this job.
https://www.antonthomasart.com/
I'm sure there are (a few) others like him, but I listened to an interview recently where he talked about completing his map of north america.
One thing it was missing was landmarks i think.
Some cities' street layout aren't so neat that turn-by-turn directions suffice. I often need to zoom-in to distinguish different turns by looking at such details like the curvatures of the streets and their relative placement. Even with the detailed map, I can make a mistake between similar-looking turns.
I also understand from this article that nobody is willing to pay for this person's replacement, and the current freelancer quoted cannot even find it in themselves to motivate others to do this kind of work.
Are these folks becoming endangered, or are there many people available but nobody to pay a living wage? Maybe this article does something to encourage funding these positions?
Also:
> "The prospect of being among the last of her kind is one of the reasons that Tangerini, who could have retired some time ago, is still here."
If the Smithsonian was willing to replace her, I'd imagine that she's actually blocking the future of the career field, rather than helping it. My supposition is that they are not planning on hiring another full-timer.
This. I personally would not have any problem doing a job like that.
To use a related example, Walt Disney created a collage specifically to teach the skills he wanted animators to have. We don’t think in those terms, but complaining about a lack of qualified people just means you’re unwilling to train people.
> Bobbi Angell, a botanical artist in Brattleboro, Vt., explains the shift: Floras are not commissioned as they once were; they are laborious and expensive undertakings, botanists retire and are not replaced, and much of plant taxonomy has shifted to the molecular level.
> “I get calls from young, aspiring artists, and it’s kind of hard to encourage them,” said Angell
The market clearly has a greatly diminished demand for these skills. It has nothing to do with unscrupulous employers, or lack of training. People just stopped buying what they were selling.
I am saying people don’t currently think in terms of a training pipeline. We have the idea that it’s up to employees to train themselves before getting the job. Thus potential illustrators contacting her and the expectation she should encourage them.
PS: As to the school, students need to pay to attend cal arts. It’s a clever cost saving means not an internal training program. They saved money even if none of the graduates worked for Disney it still increases supply.
> We have the idea that it’s up to employees to train themselves before getting the job
Regardless of who does the training, it is most certainly up to the individual to acquire their own marketable skills if they wish to go out and market them. As long as there’s demand for those skills, there’ll be people willing to train in them. Employers may wish to initiate their own training programs, but they’ll only ever do that if they have a demand for labor that’s met with a shortage of supply. This is already commonplace in industries commonly that have apprenticeships or internships. But what are you expecting? Museums to start hiring apprentice botanical illustrators, so that when they’re properly trained they can look forward to having to transition into a different field because nobody has any demand for their newly learnt skills?
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/3836526468/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?key...
For an editor trying to sell a coffe table book is just a matter of choose among this drawings and print them for free. No need to pay anybody for that. Outdated classification does not matter when the goal is just to create a beautiful and appealing book.
Painting is not copying. Painting is seeing and then making marks on the page that will make others see.
It is editorial in a way photography isn’t.
Photographs are inherently multiple; a single print might be all that exists, but the artist is at least able to make more.
Comparing photographs and prints, Picasso's "La Femme Qui Pleure I" sold for $5.1M[0], while the most paid for a photograph appears to be $4.3M, for Rhein II by Andreas Gursky[1].
I conclude from this that it's the singularity of paintings, rather than their editorial and subjective quality, that is responsible for the difference in price.
[0]: https://www.christies.com/features/saleroom-picasso-la-femme...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_photogr...
I think it’s more a matter of ‘snobbiness’ that determines prices that get paid.
The illustrator is able to draw the defining characteristics of the plant/subject and leave out what is not important. Things like veins or leaf structure to define the genus are incredibly important.
The editorial nature can bring that forward. With a picture, it is hard for a lay person to tell what details are classifying/important.
Photography is just not enough. Botanical illustration puts all required details, and only those, together in the same place.
1-Can show all the plants in the same family in the same figure.
2-Can link features that never appear at the same time (like winter buds, fall fruits, summer flowers and associated fauna and funghia),
3-Can play with the scale showing features of much different sizes at similar scale (i.e tricolpate pollen, the shape of the aperture in anthers, and silhouette of the whole tree).
4-Will show the required details, but not more. A photo will show five plants mixed in the same picture so is often very confuse for an untrained eye to understand "what" is from "who". Photos lead often to "frankenplants" and it takes a lot of experience to disclose it, and this is a problem [1].
5-Will be uniform in design. Not distracting light or cropped leaves in photos. Not backgrounds that vary among figures.
6-Will take care of correct hues and color variations. Cheap caperas distroy red hues for example. Subtle variations are notoriously difficult to reproduce. Colors will be oversaturated and will change a lot when taken in different hours of the day. Similar species will appear darker and its mimic will appear lighter. In the end you have a very confuse picture.
[1] This can seem just pedantry until you realize that your children are looking at a photo showing the fruits of an edible species, tagged as "delicious as raw berries and green parts can be used in salads" but mixed with leaves of a second species growing in the background that is poisonous (and there is not a single warn about it at sight). Internet is full of those mistakes.
"The development of photographic plates has not made illustration obsolete, despite the improvements in reproducing photographs in printed materials. A botanical illustrator is able to create a compromise of accuracy, an idealized image from several specimens, and the inclusion of the face and reverse of the features such as leaves. Additionally, details of sections can be given at a magnified scale and included around the margins around the image."
This is a real advantage of illustration, assuming the illustrator has put in their research.
> and the inclusion of the face and reverse of the features such as leaves. Additionally, details of sections can be given at a magnified scale and included around the margins around the image.
This is spurious; photos of the face and reverse of a leaf are no different from illustrations of the face and reverse of a leaf in terms of what it's possible to include in an image, and obviously the same goes for marginalia. You can composite multiple photos on one page just as easily as you can draw multiple things on one page.
The most obvious example that comes to mind for botanical illustration is the use of cross sections to display the various structures and mechanisms of a plant in a way that is readily interpretable.
And contrast idiot savants who are able to draw images perfectly, while no one believes they need to understand how whatever they're drawing works.
A photo will accurately show a specific plant. A botanical illustration can show the archetypical plant.
https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Aleksandra-Mizielinska/dp/076366...
"The map is not the territory" is a well-worn metaphor that's not really about maps anymore -- but in that book some features (cultural, architectural, physical, etc.) are given such prominence at the expense of realism that you understand much more than you would by looking at methodical cartography.
E.g. make a video of a plant, then make a model out of it and then unwrap the model depicting the most interesting features.
That part will be hard.
This is concerning: "her gaze is on plants, dried specimens of dead plants, up close, and closer, under a microscope. Sometimes she hydrates stems and flower parts, coaxing zombie life into them."
How does she know which parts of the plant to hydrate? What if it doesn't actually look like that in real life?
I can think of some ways:
- a photo can have too many details
- a drawing does not have a focal point so it can be sharper
- a drawing can accentuate some important features, like caricatures are easy to recognize then pictures
My conclusion is you can have both pictures and illustrations , use them in combination or the best tool for the job
You would be hard pressed to find a single photograph that captures this much individual information about what the various parts and stages of a dandelion look like. Even to find the leaf shape captured correctly is hard for a photograph. I think in this case there's a difference between what is photorealistic and what is useful information for identification.
Because she is a professional trained in botany