Object Lesson: Dogwood Display II by Alma W. Thomas
“I say everyone on earth should take note of the spring, coming back every year, blooming and gorgeous.” —Alma W. Thomas In Alma Thomas’s painting Dogwood Display II, a rainbow of color ripples beneath streaks of white paint, recalling the bursting blossoms of a dogwood tree, or white clouds shimmering in the sky on a… Read More
Art-Making Activity: Blooming and Becoming
New Orleans artist Ron Bechet creates large-scale paintings and drawings inspired by the Southern Louisiana landscape. This charcoal work For My Fathers is based on twisted and tangled roots of live oaks in City Park. The more you look, new shapes and forms can emerge, sharing deeper ideas about emotions and human experiences. Take a… Read More
Object Lesson: Rubber Plant by Imogen Cunningham
Although Imogen Cunningham’s earliest photographs were soft-focused, often ethereal studies of friends presented as allegories, she would become best known for images such as this one, which presented forms in nature or the human body as richly descriptive statements of fact. Trained as a chemist at the University of Washington, Cunningham also went on to… Read More
Lesson Plan: Botanical Journal
Artists and scientists rely upon careful observations to discover and represent new ideas. The deft eye and trained hand of the visual artist can help us all to realize the intricacies of the natural world. In botanical journals, naturalists drew the leaves, stems, root systems, fruits and flowers of the plants they encountered so that… Read More
Object Lesson: Rosa Alpina Vulgaris by Pierre-Joseph Redouté
Pierre-Joseph Redouté has been called the greatest botanical artist of all time. Although he received little formal education in his youth, through a series of apprenticeships, mostly in Paris where he moved at the age of 23, he acquired skills as both a painter and a botanist. He arrived in Paris in 1782, an auspicious… Read More
Object Lesson: Study for “Salut de Schiaparelli” by Ilse Bing
In 1930, Ilse Bing moved to Paris, where she was influential in fields as diverse as photojournalism, fashion photography, and advertisements. She also tinkered with avant-garde darkroom practices, inventing her own version of the solarization technique, a process that partially reversed the tones in a positive print so that certain parts appear as a negative…. Read More