Editorial Reviews
Book Description
These days, trend-conscious tastemakers from Martha Stewart to the Pottery Barn are celebrating the art of the botanical specimen. Yet this art form has enjoyed popularity for centuries. This beautiful and lavishly illustrated book is the first to present botanical specimens, herbaria, and nature prints as artworks to be collected-and even created anew.
This engaging interpretation of the colorful history of plant collection traces its progress from a hazardous natural science on eighteenth-century explorations, to a fad among Victorian-era ladies and clergyman, to a keen pursuit for today's art collectors, garden enthusiasts, and crafters.
The Pressed Plant offers a thorough representation of four different art forms consisting of or created with actual plants: botanical specimens, in which parts of or entire plants are attached to archival paper; herbaria, or bound books holding a variety of plant specimens; nature prints, images made directly from plants; and sun prints, which are produced when a plant is placed on light-sensitive paper and exposed to the sun. A detailed appendix includes instructional material, sources for materials, and a collector's buying guide.
From the Inside Flap
GRASS, FLOWER, SEAWEED, LEAF-every plant is a perfect form. When pressed to paper, its perfection is dramatically captured and revealed-as a work of nature, but with a kinship to art.
"The Pressed Plant" is the fist book to demonstrate this aesthetic phenomenon through hundreds of stunning illustrations that date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, most of which have never before been published.
Part one, The Plant Collected, shows real plants of astonishing beauty that have been collected, pressed, and mounted by botanists or by amateurs, as single sheets or bound into books called herbaria. The anecdotal text relates the intriguing and romantic story of plant collections as a hazardous natural science in uncharted territories, as a genteel Victorian pastime, and as the serious pursuit of a remarkable group of nineteenth-century women botanists.
Part Two, The Plant's Impression, shows and describes rare and classic examples of both nature prints, in which the plant is inked, pressed, and printed, and sun pictures, produced when a plant is placed on light-sensitive paper and exposed to the sun. An Afterward looks at how botanical materials are used in unusual works by leading contemporary artists, while detailed appendices describe methods of botanical specimen collecting and mounting, materials and suppliers, and botanical institutions and museums worldwide.
"The Pressed Plant" presents a fascinating view of the natural world, beautifully preserved.
The Pressed Plant
The Pressed Plant,David Winter,Andrea DiNoto,Stewart, Tabori & Chang,1556709366,Art,Assemblage Art,Botanical specimens,Collection and preservation,Crafts / Hobbies,Dried Flowers,Life Sciences - Botany,Plants,Pressed flower pictures,Techniques - General,Nature / Plants
Book Details:
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