Confluence Gallery's second show of the season, Botanical Art, will feature the work of Bobbi Angell, Briony Morrow-Cribbs, Steven Perkins, and Ellie Roden. The show is up from June 17 to July 30.
Bobbi Angell was the illustrator for The New York Times “Garden Q&A” column, and is well known in the area for her finely rendered pen and ink illustrations and etchings of flowering plants, vegetables, and horticultural specimens. In recent years, Angell has been printing at Gallery Wright Studio in Wilmington.
“Bobbi is a practitioner of a very specific and fairly technical art form,” said John Walker, curator at Confluence, in a news release. “In our digital world, the representation of detail and traditional methods she uses are a rare and special thing.”
Describing the work that will be shown in Confluence's “Botanical Art,” Walker said Angell's work “is hand-printed individually in small editions and a select few are hand tinted with watercolor. Her work is notable for the lyrical line she achieves that takes the work further than mere illustration into the realm of fine art.”
In her work for popular books like Wicked Plants, Briony Morrow-Cribbs brings her own unique style to the tradition of botanical illustration.
Born in the Bay Area and raised on an island off the coast of Washington, Briony Morrow-Cribbs lives and works in southern Vermont. Morrow-Cribbs creates intensely detailed etchings and drawings, surreal versions of the natural world.
Morrow-Cribbs characterizes her work as an attempt “to document the transformative moment when the monstrous overcomes revulsion and becomes desire.” As a printmaker, Morrow-Cribbs has shown both nationally and internationally.
Steven Perkins will show recent line drawings in pen and ink, with notations he made in the field.
Though known earlier for ultra-realistic “allegorical landscapes,” paintings with plants and the occasional critter being the protagonists, Perkins says of his recent work, “I have focused on my botanical interests, becoming a Maine Master Naturalist, getting involved with a botanical society and doing volunteer work monitoring rare plant communities for local land trusts and the New England Wildflower Society.
Ellie Roden, a recently retired teacher who taught for many years in southern Vermont's elementary schools, creates compositions of pressed flowers. She is a master of this particular art form, using a technique that maintains the flowers' vibrant colors. She sells prints of her pictures in the form of cards and other wares in fairs, galleries, and special events throughout New England.
Roden will exhibit original artwork comprising single-flower specimens and ornamental grasses culled from her garden.