STORY BEHIND THE ART OF KATHY FOLINO

Weird, Wild, & Wonderful

Second New York Botanical Garden Triennial Exhibition

2014 - 2016

Knotted Wrack with Green Sea Urchin

Ascophyllum nodosum

Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis

I guess I was already drawn to what could be considered weird plants before this exhibit was planned. I love the interesting plants I find in New England. If I lived in Australia, I'm sure I would love the interesting plants I found in my backyard there, too. In other words I try to bloom where I'm planted. I'm not so much drawn to the hybrids and fashion queens of the plant world, although I adore roses. In addition to this seaweed painting, I also submitted to WWW a vellum painting of a parasitic plant called dodder and a silverpoint of skeletonized hydrangea petals, both of which are on my ASBA member gallery page. 

I spend a lot of time beachcombing and “woodscombing”, anyway, wandering around looking mostly at the ground. My subjects usually choose me rather than the other way around. I am always thrilled when something interesting calls my name as did this bit of wrack. It was frozen in such a perfect form! And then I found the sea urchin shell, which never happens as they are so delicate that they usually are crushed to bits before anyone sees them, and this one was so tiny! 

There are obvious differences between a seaweed and a terrestrial plant that might make you think seaweed was weird, such as having holdfasts instead of roots and bladders instead of tendrils or sturdy stalks. Not to mention the fact that one is an alga that grows in the sea and one is a true plant that grows on land. But there are two rather wonderful aspects of seaweed in addition. First its form, which is similar and yet so different from a terrestrial plant; but perhaps more seductive, is the mystery of its life experience. We observe the plants in our environment first hand. We watch insects brush the blossoms in a garden and deer shoulder aside the grasses in a meadow. But the life of a seaweed is largely unobserved. What exotic creatures swim among its fronds? What mollusks nibble its margins? How does sunlight manifest on the plant's surface? We do not know for sure. The piece of dried and blackened wrack I found on the beach, frozen in imitation of its movement in the sea, is only a hint of a story we will never witness. 

When I looked at my piece of seaweed, what I saw was a piece of natural calligraphy. The fact that it is so dark only made that more obvious. Even though the specimen is dry, its original form and movement is implicit. I loved the image so much that I did a pen and ink drawing of it with a slightly altered composition and a solar plate print as well. Using veiny vellum was intuitional. The vellum is dark and swimmy, and you can imagine it as beach sand or as water with all kinds of organic matter floating around, making the seaweed more mysterious, I think.

I would hope that people who view the painting would notice the movement of the composition and the grace of the form of the seaweed. That is what I saw when I found the specimen. I hope they would say, "Look, how cool is that? and look at the little sea urchin. Isn't life amazingly beautiful?" Yup, that's what I saw and what I want everyone else to see. That's why I do it.

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