Honourable Mention March 2014
In April 2013, my sister, Maeve Hughes, and I crawled on hands and knees in local woodlands to photograph one of our favourite spring plants, the Trout Lily. We captured delicate stages of development as the plant sprouted from under dry winter leaves. As a Botanical Artist Maeve uses this photographic memory to create watercolour paintings, or coloured pencil drawings.
A year later, Toronto’s Todmorden Mills Papermill Gallery featured The Botanical Artists of Canada Juried Art Show titled The Four Seasons. Jurors, Pamela Stagg, Kathryn Chorney, and James Eckenwalder, selected 64 outstanding works for the exhibition. Artists submitted from Newfoundland, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.
Artworks are juried before acceptance in the show. My sister achieved placement for four of her submissions in the Watercolour category.
See Maeve’s Coloured Pencil winning entry, Rosehips, from November 2012 juried competition. This year Maeve earned two Honourable Mentions for Trout Lilies and Fiddleheads. Acclaim for her work makes crawling around damp woodlands in chilly spring weather worthwhile.
Months of preparation by the executive and membership of the Botanical Artists of Canada paid off with a well attended show. Heritage venue, Todmorden Mills, is an excellent locale for hosting an art show of this calibre. A record-breaking number of guests at the opening reception enjoyed a buzzing ambiance and delicious food and refreshments.
Congratulations to Best-in-Show winner, Quebec artist, Lilyane Coulombe, and to all selected artists who represented their categories.
I’m proud of my sister’s accomplishments. She is a serious student of Botanical Art, taking weekly watercolour classes at the Toronto Botanical Gardens with instructor Leslie Staples. And she meets monthly with a group of Coloured Pencil artists who appreciate the discipline of this art form. Botanical artists painstakingly study plants to reproduce incredible likenesses in various media. It’s delicate work, requiring a steady hand and dedication to perfection.
2014 Jurors:
Kathryn Chorney MScBMC is an avid nature journal-er, friend of fungi, and science/nature/medical illustrator. She is a full-time professor at Sheridan College where she teaches Scientific Illustration. An award-winning artist, Kathryn is a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI) as well as the Southern Ontario Nature and Science Illustrators (SONSI).
Pamela Stagg came across a hidden talent at a workshop at Toronto’s Civic Garden Centre in 1987, her first solo show came only a short time later in 1989, and in the same year three of her works were acquired by North America’s most important collection of botanical art. By 1991, she was awarded the world’s top prize for botanical illustration, the Royal Horticultural Society Gold Medal. Recently a commission by the Royal Canadian Mint to design the Trillium Coin for the prestigious Pure Gold Coin series. Pamela’s book Roses: A Celebration, published by Northpoint Press in the Fall of 2003, containing more than thirty of her original paintings. It is available in major bookstores in Canada, the US and UK.
Dr. James E. Eckenwalder, Associate Professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Dr. Eckenwalder’s area of interest is plant systematics.
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