"the world's first gallery dedicated entirely to botanical art [really ?] opens at Kew Gardens in London.
The gallery's collection features a depiction of the orchid by artist Carol Woodin, who travelled to Peru specially to paint [Phragmipedium kovachii]... Shirley Sherwood, owner of the painting and the woman whose name has been given to the new gallery. Sherwood began collecting in 1990 and now has more than 700 works, with more than 100 in the inaugural exhibition. She said she would find it hard to stop collecting... "... There's been a huge renaissance in botanical art in the last 10 years in particular." The growth in interest has been fuelled by the increasing popularity of gardening, as well as the heightened collective awareness of all things environmental. The Shirley Sherwood gallery allows Kew to display a... fraction of the art it owns. Its archives contain more than 200,000 items of botanical art [impressing !], from work produced by artists on early exploration ships during the age of discovery, to some of the most highly regarded botanical artists in history, such as GD Ehret, an 18th century German watercolourist. The oldest item in the exhibition is a plant book from 1491, the Hortus Sanitatis, or Garden of Health, which was printed in Mainz, Germany. Its... woodcut illustrations combine science and myth, such as the displayed page of a female mandrake in fruit. ... Chris Mills, Kew's head of library and archives, said the botanical art collection... - the biggest in the world - was of "enormous variety and extremely high quality". But the problem has always been seeing it. Up until now, if you wanted to view any of it you would have had to put the request in writing - and even then you would have to know what you wanted to see, with browsing discouraged for security reasons. ... even Kew does not know the full extent of its stock, with archivists only about halfway through the painstaking task of cataloguing the 200,000-plus items held in its stores. "It's a side of Kew people just don't know about," admitted Mills, with... many years' work left still to do. Most of the artworks are stored in Kew Gardens' herbarium, a large building containing a maze of cabinets which also house some 7m dried plant specimens from over the centuries and the personal collections of collectors including Charles Darwin and David Livingstone. ... The plan is to have three different exhibitions a year, with the inaugural display of highlights from Sherwood's collection of contemporary work and Kew itself running from Saturday until October. The gallery... Built over the last year... the main space is in effect a box within a box because of the need for low light and controlled humidity." URL : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/17/artsnews.gardens ******************* Regards, VB _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
