Illustration & The Environment

Before photography, Illustration was the only way to record and show visuals of strange creatures, no matter in prehistoric time or during the last few centuries. Early humans used to paint on the wall or ceiling of caves to record surroundings. With the progress of technology and the enlightenment of knowledge, the study of nature has become more rigorous and nature illustrations have become more detailed, informative and educational, which is so called scientific illustration. Scientific illustrations provide a visual basis for scientific research, which can go beyond the complex language often used to describe scientific topics and allow for a greater understanding of the subject.

Cave paintings are humanity’s oldest form of visual art. The oldest known cave paintings are more than 44,000 years old, found in both the Franco-Cantabrian region in western Europe, and in the caves in the district of Maros (Sulawesi, Indonesia). The most common subjects in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bulls, horses, and deers.

Although only two examples are picked to show prehistoric illustrations, they are enough to stimulate our imagination and make us guess about the animals and things that were related to the human at that time.

For thousands of years, illustrations have been used to depict observations and inform others. Early scientific illustration was the primary way to capture images of newly discovered animal species, to show internal human anatomy, or to create an index of plant or animal species. This was necessary before the imaging capabilities of the modern were invented.

Wall charts were a familiar component of the classroom through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book Botanical art from the golden age of scientific discovery contains an exquisite collection of historic botanical wall charts. Each wall chart is accompanied by captions that offer accessible information about the species featured, the scientists and botanical illustrators who created it, and any particularly interesting or innovative features the chart displays. This book provides information about plant anatomy and morphology and species differences, the illustrations are all presented in exquisite, larger-than-life detail. This book shows the unique fusion of art, science, and education, the wall charts gathered in the book offer a glimpse into a wonderful scientific heritage.

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.

Edward Abbey（1927-1989）， a famous American writer on nature, once said, "Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread."Illustration, as an important form of visual communication in modern design, plays the role of coordinator between the environment and human beings with its intuitive imagery, real sense of life and appeal of beauty. The following three parts are mainly from the theme of nature illustration, nature itself is illustration, and giving new life to materials to introduce how illustration plays the role of coordinator between the environment and human beings.Nature-themes illustration provides spaces the audience with connections to environment by recording, translating, and describing the nature.

Illustrations about the environment

Clare Celeste is an artist and environmentalist. She works with thousands of hand-cut images of flora and fauna to create immersive installations that are evocative of our planet’s threatened biodiversity. She is dedicated to raising awareness and action around the ecological and biodiversity crisis. Despite the vibrancy and lively qualities of the three-dimensional collages, Clare Celeste uses her artworks to reflect on the ongoing climate crisis and destruction of biodiversity, commentary that’s laced with themes of decay and death. She explains: This came into focus for me when I made a series of collages and then later realized that many of the species in the vintage illustrations had already gone extinct. Humanity has wiped out 68% of all our planet’s biodiversity since 1970, so working with vintage illustrations can be very heartbreaking as much of the diversity in these gorgeous old naturalist prints has been wiped out by human activity.

Allison May Kiphuth is an artist and lifelong nature enthusiast based in Maine. shrinks the expansive landscapes found throughout the eastern United States into picturesque dioramas brimming with natural life by squeezing them into small wooden boxes scarcely a few inches wide. Her mixed media dioramas are constructed from layered ink and watercolor illustrations assembled with pins and string inside antique boxes. The content of each artwork varies from piece to piece from underwater scenes of sea life, to tiny worlds populated by forest creatures.

Alonsa Guevara is a New York based artist. Her paintings blur the lines between fantasy and reality while celebrating the connection between humankind and nature. A big part of her inspiration derives from her childhood spent living in the Ecuadorian rainforest with her family, growing up surrounded by tropical landscapes and a diverse wildlife. Using round canvases with a range of diameters, Alonsa Guevara deftly paints the plump, juicy insides of oranges, watermelon, and other fruits. Each circular piece depicts a seemingly perfect slice down the middle, capturing the fibrous veins and central seeds found within fresh produce. “ I decided to paint the fruits cut open, revealing their insides, recreating and depicting all the incredible patterns, seeds, and infinite information they carry, which many people take for granted.”

Illustration using natural materials

Across 3,000-square meters, “Beyond Crisis'' shows a little girl with a hand-drawn farandole circling around her. She peers across the mountainous region toward the horizon. The expansive piece is Saype’s encouraging response to the ongoing threat of COVID-19 worldwide. The artist began working on grassy landscapes in 2015 as a way to merge his penchant for land art and graffiti, which since has inspired an artistic movement. For his massive projects, Saype uses paint derived from natural materials like coal and chalk.

England-based artist Helen Ahpornsiri, she grows and collects flora, foliage, and seaweeds which she preserves with traditional flower pressing methods before delicately re-imagining them into artworks. Flowers commonly considered weeds are unassuming yet familiar, they can be imbued in folk tales and personal connotations which resonate with people in different ways. She is interested in the idea of preserving plants like these and giving them a new narrative.

Why do illustrators give materials a new life?

Mike Stilkey from Los Angeles has been attracted to painting the book itself. If discarded books end up in his hands, they become something else entirely. He works with local libraries to give those books a second chance with his massive art installations. Stilkey arranges the faces and spines of books in groupings of varying size, ranging from a half dozen stacked together to thousands-tall-towers that fill public spaces. With a combination of colored pencil­­­­­ , ink, paint, and lacquer, he then paints lively characters using the books as his canvas.

Basia Irland has created a new three-plate (gravure, etching, and aquatint) limited-edition print, River Reverie, for the Museum De Domijnen.

The dutch artist captures a moment in time and transforms something ugly into valuable objects through a unique production process that combines her long-term research on color and form with the time-consuming craft of hand tufting. Embracing imperfection is in fact a respond to the overcontrolled society in which we live. People witnesse the beauty of the slow growing process of the fungi pattern, surrounded by the natural environment of the city, connecting the inner time with a sense of home.

In 1956, the British author C. P. Snow pointed out the cultural divide between humanists and scientists in The Two Cultures. In the modern concept, "nature" often stands opposed to the truth and true "science" and is the object of scientific research. But today we are more aware that human civilization has never been able to stay out of nature; The fragile nature of ecology and the impact of human behavior have caused the continuous destruction of natural environment ecology, which is an urgent issue for all living creatures to face. The potential gift of "Anthropocene" is that it allows "Anthropos" to jump out of classical anthropology and humanities, and thus to be placed in a broader field and vision, and to rethink nature, human beings and the relationship between them from the perspective of illustration design. And better understand a world facing unprecedented man-made environmental disasters.

The art illustration of environment and ecology can make the audience have artistic resonance, and the audience can feel the surround of nature and the positive praise and emotion of the human audience towards nature.

Strawberry Thief is one of William Morris's most popular repeating designs for textiles. It takes as its subject the thrushes that Morris found stealing fruit in the kitchen garden of his countryside home, Kelmscott Manor, in Oxfordshire. To print the pattern Morris used the painstaking indigo-discharge method he admired above all forms of printing.

A draft of Willow

Tulip and Willow, using the indigo discharge technique, sketches and finished products are compared.

Trellis, which depicts roses climbing on a lattice, was designed by William Morris and his friend Philip Webb in 1862, and is shown in four color schemes in a sample book.

"Morris &Company prints are among the most recognized and loved in the world, and William Morris was not only synonymous with the Arts and Crafts Movement, but also a strong advocate of beautiful design. We are delighted to be working with this iconic British brand and to be able to share these designs with our customers, "said Pernilla Wohlfahrt, Design Director at H&M. Through the cooperation with William Morris, a veteran British artist, H&M, which is popular with the young generation, can let people appreciate the environment and the design derived from nature. These illustrations can make us feel close to nature and help the young generation get familiar with the beauty of nature.

Illustrations about environmental ecology will make the audience care about nature and think about the future vision of the ecological environment. With the improvement of artistic vision and the birth of new creative thinking, new artists try to make plants and paintings communicate.

Elements that exist in nature are transformed into works of art. What can we feel from the painting of trees, the sound of the sea, the twinkling of clouds and the warm sun if we transform the elements existing in nature into works of art? Maybe they'll give you the answer. Tim Knowles, a British artist, tied a sketch pen to a tree branch and put a paper on a drawing board to record the natural movement of the tree branch as it swayed in the breeze. The interesting conceptual work hides a man's loneliness and whimsical view of the natural world around him, trying to reproduce the beauty of the power of nature in the form of art.

Heidi Norton is a New York-based artist whose 1970s upbringing as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia resulted in a strong connection to the land, plant life and nature. She works regularly with materials of varying transparency such as resin, glass, and wax in a way that preserves, encases, and displays embedded plant life and organic forms.

"Artist Heidi Norton and I share an abiding interest in all things plants. During several conversations we had while I was profiling her for Art Ltd., we often talked about the relationship between art and gardening. Heidi incorporates living plant matter directly into her sculptures and has used various types of houseplants in her New Age Still Life photographs, along with the more recent series of images shown in her show Not To See the Sun at Ebersmoore last month (April 2011). Heidi and I have continued to talk about the relationship of art, plants, and gardening, and as the next iteration of what has become an ongoing exchange, we’ve decided to conduct a series of interviews with other artists to further explore those connections. Voila: Mantras for Plants, a new, irregularly appearing series of posts." -Claudine Ise

The chain reaction of the series makes the audience begin to try to communicate with nature through the form of illustration and perceive the emotional communication between plants and illustrators. As an illustrator, the communication and emotional communication with plants today and in the future has become a new trend in the illustration art industry.

Marc Majewskiis a French author-illustrator based in Berlin. As a child, Marc discovered a passion for drawing and painting through the works of Gustave Doré, Maurice Sendak, Quint Buchholz, and symbolist painters. After obtaining a degree in literature and arts, he studied illustration and painting for two years. Marc’s first book, Un Beau Voyage, was published in 2016. Marc is passionate about the environment and loves painting landscapes and scenes from the natural world.

Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg said, “I want to make an artwork for pollinators, not about them. We’re creating a digital artwork made from living plants, exploring how the audience of an artwork can be more-than-human, and asking how art can be useful in the ecological crisis. The Eden Project is the perfect partner for this interspecies art experiment and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with their experts and learn from them.” The project will also involve collaborating with Eden’s expert network of horticulturists, scientists and consultants. This includes the National Wildflower Centre which is based at the Eden Project, Eden’s master beekeeper Rodger Dewhurst and pollination consultant David Goulson. In addition, machine-learning expert and string theory physicist, Dr. Przemek Witaszczyk of Jagiellonian University, Kraków, will help develop the algorithms behind the planting programme.

The artist's ambition is to extend this web function into a global platform for creative activism, and Ginsberg is currently in conversation with the Eden Project and multiple international partners to realize this vision. Selected by a curatorial panel of leading voices in the worlds of art and culture, Ginsberg’s artwork will be an ambitious large-scale installation.

No matter in the past or at present, the development of Human culture and technology is inseparable from the exploration and research of nature. Illustration depicts plants, animals and the environment on canvas, from macroscopic to microscopic, and makes the knowledge accessible for all audiences. Even in the modern age of photography, illustrations are still essential to communicate information. They are irreplaceable because of their ability to translate concepts, thoughts and imaginations into visuals that allow audiences to feel and understand the natural world from different angles. -Ting Zhou

I was impressed by the fact that illustration can play a role in connecting the environment and the human audience in various ways through this reader project. I hope as an illustrator this Illustration & Environment will be an opportunity for the audience to think again about the environment that may have been a little forgotten from their heart. -Yejin Ham

Environmental projects are the subject of my life. I hope to play a vital role as a visual communicator in the future, so that the audience can more clearly understand the importance of the environment. -Jiahui Wang

The study of the reader allows me to have a deeper understanding and pioneering thinking in the field of illustration and environment research. Illustration today and in the future is playing an important role in the field of art, is broad and conductive. I think illustration has more sentimental value than photography and science as the modern world’s understanding of the environment and ecology. It sustains the emotion of the illustrator and nature. In the future, I will continue to study and expand the importance of illustration design to the environment. -Yu Zhang