"Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings" is on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show spans sixty years of work, including his early sketches in 1940s Paris, his recent work in upstate New York, and everywhere in between. “Each drawing that I’ve done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw."
An exhibit at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh documents the success of a project called extInked. A social experiment and an ecological initiative, the project paired one hundred of the country's threatened flora, fauna, and fungi with volunteers that would become ambassadors for their species, with a tattoo to prove it.
For the last forty years, landscape architects in Brussels have installed a colorful public exhibit—an enormous carpet of begonias on the cobblestone square at Grand-Palace. This year's inaguration will be on August 15th, and the begonias will be on display through the 19th.
German artist Cornelia Konrads uses organic objects such as stones, sticks, and logs to build installations that are both natural and surreal. In her work, movement is a promise withheld.
When Gene Bauer was the native flora chairman of California Garden Clubs in the 1970s, she made small booklets of silk-screened botanic illustrations and sent them to members. Made in limited editions of 50, her booklets are rare and collectible, though the artwork has been collected in a book, Botanical Serigraphs: The Gene Bauer Collection.
London-based artist Zadok Ben-David makes flowers and trees out of cut metal, including his best-known pieces, which feature intricate flowers, modeled after Victorian illustrations.
Turkish architect Emre Ozberk designs miniature landscapes that are meant to be pruned, weeded, and mowed. Call it armchair gardening. The earliest landscapes were rooted in his the perfectly sized food bowls of his cat, Papas, for whom the collection is named.
Pep Ventosa's tree portraits are composed of multiple photographs, shot as he circles the subject. In this slide show, Ventosa tells us a bit more about his series "In the Round - Trees," his painting-like images of trees around the world.
Beth Dow's photographs of formal English and Italian gardens capture quiet moments that belie a garden's ever-humming life. In the Garden is a meditation on classic concepts of paradise and garden design, in which the photographer becomes a gardener, guiding the viewer's eye and creating a mood. She tells us a bit about some of her favorite photographs from In the Garden.
British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey use grass to make pictures—"living" photographs. Wielding the traditional tools of the artist and the gardener to harness a plant's natural photosynthesis, the artists' process is a nice synthesis of art and science.
