8 minute read
Fine art - An insight into the Gardens’ botanical illustrators
ART FOR SCIENCE’S SAKE
BOTANICAL ARTISTS ARE BECOMING A RARE AND ENDANGERED SPECIES, BUT NOT IN THE GARDENS, WHERE THE VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION HAS NEVER BEEN IN DOUBT. DAVID CARROLL REPORTS.
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Fossicking through archive boxes as part of the Herbarium digitisation project recently, Catherine Wardrop and Lesley Elkan were surprised to discover some hitherto unknown works by the much-revered Margaret Flockton.
It’s not uncommon for the pair to chance upon ‘lost’ botanical illustrations included in scientific reports or notes filed decades earlier, but further investigation of the boxes yielded literally hundreds of additional “jewels” by the woman who in 1901 became the Gardens’ first permanent botanical illustrator.
“We thought Margaret did around 2,500 illustrations in her 26 years with the Gardens,” says Wardrop, who for the past 17 years has job-shared the Gardens’ botanical illustrator role with Elkan. “But, as a result of our sifting, it looks like the figure may be more up around 4,000. She was just incredibly prolific.”
By comparison, Wardrop and Elkan estimate that in their time together at the Gardens they have produced around 600 illustrations.
“Of course, Margaret didn’t have email. She didn’t have children. She was working under [Director] Joseph Maiden, who I think would have been very driven. And she didn’t have the annual Margaret Flockton Award to run each year.”
Wardrop and Elkan are both past recipients of the celebrated award, which they helped launch in 2004 and have managed since 2009. Each year they spend around two months directing the program, which involves printing, framing, judging and hanging works submitted from almost 90 artists around the world. The exhibition itself regularly attracts thousands of visitors.
“This year, once again, it revealed some extraordinary illustrators,” says Elkan. “The number and quality that we received from South America alone, for instance, was amazing. And we are also now seeing entries from countries such as Thailand and Indonesia.”
All of which would suggest the world of botanical illustration is alive and kicking. Yet Wardrop and Elkan are now thought to hold the only two permanent illustrator roles in herbaria in Australia. In the face of relentless funding cuts, other organisations instead employ illustrators on a freelance and piecemeal basis – a less-than-optimal arrangement given the copyright is held by the freelancer.
Not that the Gardens has been untouched by funding restrictions. When Elkan joined, it employed two full-time scientific illustrators and a part-time artist, who mostly focused on illustrations for signage.
“We are still in an extremely fortunate position because at the Gardens the illustrator role is appreciated in its importance to communicate botanical science to the scientific and broader community,” she says. “Other illustrators have not been so lucky.”
The botanical art world received a further blow last year when the University of Newcastle discontinued the country’s only dedicated natural history illustration degree. It’s a course that both Wardrop and Elkan knew well, having completed an earlier iteration before landing their current roles.
While Newcastle provided an important nexus for the pair, the paths that led them to the world of botanical illustration were quite different.
Elkan was in her third year of a bachelor’s degree in environmental biology at the University of Technology Sydney when a fellow student asked her to do some illustrations for his PhD work on aquatic ecology.
“I really enjoyed it, so my brother contacted the Gardens and asked what books I should get if I was interested in botanical illustration. The two full-time scientific illustrators at the time, David
Mackay and Nicola Oram, kindly pointed me in the direction of Newcastle.”
Elkan’s timing was fortuitous. Shortly after graduating she got back in touch with the Gardens, only to discover that after 10 years in the role, Mackay was leaving. In late 1995 she started in a temporary capacity, before eventually securing a permanent part-time role.
Wardrop’s journey was just as serendipitous. After leaving school she pursued a degree in print making in Canberra, with her graduating work focusing on ‘flowers as a metaphor’ – a theme she explored through detailed glass engravings and wallpaper.
“I then heard that at the CSIRO you could be employed to draw flowers, so I turned up with my wallpaper and a lovely botanist was crazy enough to give me a go. I learned my botany on the job, and then a couple of years later I headed to Newcastle.”
After missing out on the coveted permanent role Elkan eventually secured, Wardrop returned to Canberra but remained engaged by doing some volunteer work. Then in December 1998, following Oram’s departure, she landed a part-time role.
The pair eventually began sharing the Garden’s one remaining full-time position in 2004 – an arrangement Wardrop thinks works, in part, because their styles as illustrators are so similar.
“At the same time, we bring different and complementary strengths to the role. For instance, I tend to always be thinking of the next thing, while Lesley has a great capacity to remember what we’ve done in the past.”
Today – or at least in pre-COVID times – a typical week mostly involves collaborating with the Gardens’ botanists to illustrate newly-named plant species. The finished work is then incorporated into scientific papers published in Telopea* or other scientific journals. In addition, the pair produce illustrations for NSW Flora Online – PlantNET^ , as well as for signage and brochures.
Among the hundreds of illustrations they’ve completed, there are plenty that have stood out. A highlight for Wardrop was drawing in 2003 the first flowering of Amorphophallus titanum.
“I sat with it for three days and created three full scientific plates. I also noticed a feature that I don’t think anyone else had noted before. Unfortunately, the botanist in charge was retiring, so the illustrations were never published.”
Given the importance of their work – and the constant reminders of the standards set by their illustrious predecessors – Wardrop says she and Elkan are “absolutely” conscious of a connection to the past and the future.
“We are always aiming for the level of quality that Margaret Flockton set, and at the same time we are always aware that our illustrations will live a lot longer than us, so we’d better do it well and provide the complete botanical story.”
Elkan says it’s always been an honour to draw something for the first time, and now, in the face of a changing climate, their work is only becoming more vital.
“A lot of the plants we illustrate may be rare, threatened or even extinct in the wild, so we are providing an important visual record of botanical diversity. For instance, I recently drew Hibbertia fumana, which was thought to be extinct, but was rediscovered in 2016 on land in south-western Sydney that was being surveyed alongside the site of a new freight terminal. It’s still at risk because of habitat loss, degradation and fire.”
Wardrop says she and Elkan are keen to stay in their roles for “as long as we can draw and perform at the highest level”.
As to the future of botanical illustration itself, Elkan says the decision to close the Newcastle course was undoubtedly a blow that reflected a lack of understanding of just how important botanical art is to society.
“People have an extraordinary love for hand-drawn or painted illustrations, and they are often in awe of them in a way they are not with photographs. By removing unwanted information and highlighting what’s important, a hand-drawn illustration can tell a plant’s life-cycle story and its plight, and they somehow make it more accessible.”
“A photograph can’t do what we do,” says Wardrop. “It can’t reconstruct a dead flower. You can’t reimagine with photography. And a large part of our responsibility and role is to interpret the science, the written taxonomy, and recreate from material at hand, a full and convincing representation of the plant.”
Despite the challenges facing scientific artists, Elkan remains optimistic.
“Although the permanent jobs might not exist, I’m still seeing lots of talented illustrators out there, many of whom are exceptionally creative in their endeavours to make money – from launching their own projects and books to liaising with other gardens.
“If someone really wants to become a botanical illustrator, they will.”
*The Gardens’ journal of plant systematics. ^NSW Flora Online – PlantNET, is the Gardens’ online Plant Information Network System, providing the community with information on NSW plant names, their distribution and conservation status. Photos: © Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust
Elkan with her ‘secret weapon’
DRAWING IN THE DIGITAL AGE To the uninitiated, the precise and refined world of botanical illustration might appear to have been largely unbothered by the technological advances of the past century. The reality is a little different.
Back in 1901 when Margaret Flockton began creating and reproducing works of art for the Gardens, she used an elaborate printing technique called lithography, which involved a waxy crayon and a limestone plate. Today, Lesley Elkan and Catherine Wardrop still create preliminary drawings using graphite on paper, but they complete their finished works entirely digitally, using a stylus and drawing tablet.
“The technology is now so good, and so perfectly suited to producing the clean lines and stipple we require, that we believe our digital drawings are just as good as our old technical pens on film, and they are much more time-efficient to produce,” says Elkan.
“With a tablet, we also have the option of being able to ‘undo’, which can be very helpful when trying to draw long parallel lines!”
On average, a full-plate illustration – which includes a flowering or fruiting branch, along with floral dissections – will take between three and five days, depending on the quality of source material provided. Photos, along with flowers or vegetative material preserved in alcohol, are particularly helpful, while the most challenging drawings are those in which the pair work from just a single pressed, dried specimen.
When it comes to technology, Elkan and Wardrop do have another “secret weapon” besides their drawing tablet – a binocular drawing microscope that uses a special 'drawing tube’ to refract an image of their drawing hand over the magnified specimen.
“Rather than measure and transfer, it allows us to actually trace, enabling us to draw more accurately.”
The combination of art and technology allows the pair to produce between 30 and 40 full plates a year, along with many smaller drawings.
