If art is about looking deeply at the world and considering it in all of its complexity, then botanical art has much to offer on that front. With their meticulously rendered details of insect damage on leaves, the delicate veining of autumn leaves or the fragile tendrils of a seedling’s roots, botanical artists put an artistic, rhapsodic microscope on the natural world, reminding us of its beauty and intricacy.
For that reason alone, “Following in the Bartrams’ Footsteps: Contemporary Botanical Artists Explore the Bartrams’ Legacy,” at the Atlanta History Center, has much to recommend it. Artists like Lizzie Sanders’ lyrical watercolor on paper image of the perennial plant “Spiderwort” suggests a pas de deux involving two ethereal dancers. Violet flowers perch on thin green stalks and long green limbs arch away from the stalk like arms arrayed in a gracious gesture. This signature image in the show, like others in this exhibition of 44 botanical works, is invested with something close to sentience in Sanders’ hands. The natural world, as trite as it may sound, comes alive.
But “Following in the Bartrams’ Footsteps,” at the Cherokee Garden Library, is more than just an exhibition of works in watercolor, pencil and charcoal. The theme of the exhibit is famed American naturalists John Bartram (1699-1777) and William Bartram (1739-1823), a father and son team who were the Charles Darwins of the plant kingdom. They criss-crossed America with a particular avidity, gobbling up information about the country’s countless flowers, plants and trees and documenting the new species and varieties they encountered. They discovered new plants like the Franklin tree, found in Georgia and named for their friend and fellow intellectual omnivore Benjamin Franklin. They also disseminated their knowledge and floral booty across the ocean, shipping seeds and plants to Europe to satisfy British landowners anxious to create naturalistic gardens. William Bartram was also a keen documentarian of the natural world and is said to have sketched more than 200 drawings of natural specimens. He is considered the first native North American botanic artist whose seminal book, “Travels,” documented his botanical journey throughout the American South in the 18th century.
The plants and flowers depicted in “Following” are composed of plants discovered or introduced by the Bartrams. Jurors looked at 192 botanical entries from members of the American Society of Botanical Artists, before selecting the artworks that appear in the exhibition.
There are key artworks in the exhibition arresting for both their beauty and peculiarity and the almost fetishistic way they catalogue the natural world. Beverly Duncan’s “Bartram’s Seeds” is a precise drawing of 25 varieties of seeds, from white oak to staghorn sumac, from pinpoint tiny to the size of a golf ball. Their exquisite variety is its own visual case for the phenomenal diversity of the natural world. In the lower right of her watercolor on paper, Duncan has included a ladybug to give a sense of scale and perspective to her assortment of seeds, while also striking a note of whimsy for its non-sequitur presence.
Fixated on nature as these drawings are, they naturally reflect the primary life and death tensions of that world; of decay and the lifeless, brown husks of spent flowers, but also the hopefulness in the gently urgent growth of a seedling emerging from a split seed. Affirming the cyclical and mutually beneficial dimension to this natural world, artist Wendy Cortesi supplements her hyper-realistic depiction of the many life-stage variations of the sassafras tree with the larval and butterfly forms of the spicebush swallowtail, a known companion of the tree. The piece has the cheerfully illustrative, instructive aspect of a schoolteacher’s lesson on the circularity of the ecosystem.
For intrepid types inspired by these vivid depictions of nature, “Following in the Bartrams’ Footsteps” continues outside, where 10 plants featured in the exhibit can be seen on the Atlanta History Center grounds.
Art Review
“Following in the Bartrams’ Footsteps: Contemporary Botanical Artists Explore the Bartrams’ Legacy”
Through June 17, 2014. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. Free. McElreath Hall, Atlanta History Center, 130 West Paces Ferry Road, NW. 404-814-4000, www.atlantahistorycenter.com
Bottom line: An array of contemporary botanical art is juxtaposed with the history of botanical discovery in this interesting, multi-faceted exhibition.