South African botanical art : a study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagery

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:Botanical art consists of a complex combination of scientific fact and aesthetic awareness, and isconcerned with more than the realistic representation of a plant and its flowers. It goes beyondthe visual description of scientific information and speaks about the contributions artists havemade through history to the conventions of both art and science. It contains a unique visuallanguage, conventions which we read intelligently and an evolved tradition, and it is thislanguage and the development of these conventions within the genre of South African botanicalart, which this thesis investigates.In South Africa botanical art developed as a direct result of European interest in the flora andthe colonisation of this country by the West. A brief history of responses to South Africanplants is discussed in the Introduction in order to begin to establish an understanding of thistradition and to contextualise the contributions made by 19th-and 20th -century South Africanbotanical artists.Now that postmodernity has called for the reassessment and questioning of 'given truths',alternative ways of assessing botanical art are slowly evolving. Through study and thecomparison of botanical art and artists of South Africa their evaluation as artists is reconsidered.This issue of defining art and artists is the subject of Chapter One of this study.Some of the factors that have a bearing on this include: relationships between text and image; artand science; art and illustration; and how society's expectations of gender roles affect theproduction of botanical art.In order to establish a context from which to discuss plant imagery in South Africa, it isimportant to study the history and development of botanical art in this country. Chapter Twodiscusses the emergence and development of this art form and its artists, starting with a shortdescription of people and events from the 1600s and then takes a comprehensive look atdevelopments in the 19th and 20m centuries. For the artists working within the genre of botanical art, the conventions and inventions areoften explicitly formulated. It is an art based on the logic, scrutiny and informative tradition ofscience, where the main objective is to represent a plant's structural essence. Fundamental to ourresponse to botanical art, however, is the style and technique employed by the artist. ChapterThree is devoted to a detailed discussion of the work of selected contemporary South Africanbotanical art and artists. By comparing their work it is possible to establish trends anddevelopments in representation and the role played by mediums and techniques in this highlyskilled art form.Since this research has both a theoretical and a practical component, Chapter Four is devoted todiscussion of my own work within the botanical art genre. I describe and illustrate several relatedseries of paintings and explore established conventions and ways of developing my own stylisticidentity as a botanical artist.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University