Do you ever wake up in the morning and think your hair seems a little all over the place. Count yourself lucky, some out there have truly wild hair. Cleverly creative street artists incorporate living plants into their artwork by using nearby vegetation to add hair to their subjects heads. When done well it offers …
The second instalment of our two-part series of tree paintings. On Friday we showed 20 paintings by women and today it’s the men’s turn. It is interesting to note the type of tree that is chosen as subject matter, and how they handle the respective rendering of these vegetative masterpieces. 1. Lucian Freud – Acacia, …
Plant Curator has been scouring the web for plant cartoons and cartoonist with only a modicum of success. Why the dearth? As Berger and Wyse have shown, there is so much humour to be had with plants. However, theirs tend to be focused on produce (i.e. fruit and vegetables) and we want plant plant cartoons. What …
Yesterday we looked at a 19th Century natural history artist with enduring appeal, today we focus on an outstanding modern day one. Rachel Pedder-Smith is a contemporary botanical artist who achieved acclaim for her Herbarium Specimen Painting, first exhibited at Kew Gardens in 2012. At five meters long, this large-scale watercolour montage of plant bits …
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a German zoologist, philosopher, professor, physician, naturalist, biologist, writer and natural history artist. So somewhat of an overachiever then. He is on record for having done lots of significant things, like discovering over a thousand new species, coining the term ecology and selling Darwin’s theory of evolution to Germany and the …
On paper the Goaman’s marriage was made in heaven. They both lived together and worked together, but that’s not the good bit. They also designed stamps together and better still, a large number of those had a botanical theme. Is there a more pleasurable activity you could possibly do with your partner? Michael and Sylvia …
Fabric designs are teeming with botanical and floral artistry this Spring as always – plants are always on trend, every season, in one form or another. We particularly like those designers that avoid the well-known plants and floral cliches, going instead for something different. Ferns seem to be popular at the moment with both Sanderson …
Patrick Caulfield, CBE, RA (1936 – 2005) is a celebrated UK artist, immediately recognisable for his bold, reductive, outline heavy creations of everyday objects. The critic Christopher Finch described him as a “Romantic disarmed by his own sense of irony”. He somehow managed to paint very little but portray so much. Although considered an ‘urban …
Plant Curator was lucky enough to see Yoko Ono perform (music) at the Royal Festival Hall c.2005. She was a petit, yapping, avant-garde wonder, shiningly entertaining at that. She currently has a major retrospective of her career that spans five decades at Guggenheim Bilbao. It shows just how much she has achieved. She is her …
Poverty, madness and creative genius, unfortunately often makes for a good story, which is why Plant Curator is keen to see the 2008 film Séraphine. Based on the life of French artist Séraphine de Senlis (1864–1942), it gives an account of her rather sad but artistically productive life. Born into a poor family of labourers and …