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BOTANICALS
by Heidi Venamore
9 to 31 March 2016
Under the patronage of HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal, Jacaranda Images is proud to host an exhibition of exquisitely detailed botanical paintings and prints by Heidi Venamore.
Intertwining art and science, Heidi Venamore brings nature to life on the page. Her work is technical and detailed, with a focus on accuracy alongside the natural beauty of the plant form. She uses art to portray the vibrance and cleverness of nature through authentic portraits of plants and flowers which translate their habit, colour and form onto the page. Her objective is to attract one’s attention with a vibrant, arresting composition, then draw in the viewer to ever-closer inspection of the work as the layers reveal the secrets of the plant.
Heidi prepares various studies and layouts, checks the botanical details and can take up to 70 or more hours per work to layer the washes needed to reflect true colour. The result is a beautifully structured work which has a level of technical accuracy to meet the botanist’s critical eye and a beauty to satisfy the aesthete. Tactile and vibrant, or sweet and delicate, the plant is allowed to speak for itself through the media of pencil and paint.
Heidi has long been inspired by the great flower painters of history and the plant collectors with whom they worked hand-in-glove. Both illustrators and the European masters who specialised in the extraordinary plant discoveries of their time gave immortality to their subjects and information to science. Botanical illustration, of such key importance to science from the 16th to 19th centuries, encouraged great artistic achievement and development over this period.
Heidi’s work is a marriage of old and new, technique and beauty, art and science. It is a passion carried on in the same tradition as the painters of the past.
” Lucky will be the owner of any painting or drawing which bears this artist’s signature …This is as close to perfection as I have ever seen in 30 years of teaching botanical art.”
Margaret Stevens
Past President of the Society of Botanical Artist
Heidi Venamore brings all the aspects of modern artistic techniques and materials to her botanical painting, as well as learning from the old masters, aspects which combine to produce very real – yet very appealing – pieces of art. This exhibition of original works and fine quality limited edition prints will show the work Heidi has done in Jordan and beyond from various gardens of note.
Heidi Venamore
Heidi Venamore is completing a Diploma in Botanical Art from the Society of Botanical Artists and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London(named after the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus) and a painting member of the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society which records the plants growing in the Physic Garden.
Born in Australia, Heidi has spent 12 years in the Middle East since 1993. She currently lives in Amman where she serves as the Ambassador of Australia to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
