DEREK NORMAN

2017 ASBA James White Service Award for Dedication to Botanical Art

by Libby Kyer

His shock of white hair and engaging smile make him easy to find in any gathering, and that suits him, as Derek Norman is all about connections. He’s never met a challenge in his life that doesn’t involve finding a bond between people, plants, science, and art. Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Derek – the recipient of the ASBA 2017 James White Award for Dedication to Botanical Art.

Derek hails from Shropshire, England, (a Shropshire lad, you might say) which lies on the border with Wales. A little northwest of Birmingham, it is home to fields lush with crops, the Severn River with its streams and rills, where there seems to be an ancient contract between its citizens and the land. An understanding of plants as central to survival permeates English life. As Derek tells it, “Both my parents had a passion for plants, gardens, gardening, and the local annual Shrewsbury Flower Show.”

When young, Derek’s health sometimes required him to be still to be well. His mother brought art materials into this scenario, and art became integral to Derek’s life. She was an enthusiastic botanical painter highly influenced by Dutch flower painting of the 1700’s, working in gouache on black paper to provide the effect of the dark grounds found in those masters’ artworks. All during his childhood he loved to draw and paint.

After high school, he continued his education at Chester School of Art, (one of 17 Schools of Art and Science, set up by Royal Degree by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1851 after the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace). Here he studied in a fine arts program with long hours dedicated to mastering the disciplines of drawing, anatomy, perspective, composition, and painting.

Derek finished his degree, then worked a year as an exchange student in the US, immersing himself in continental travel and learning a lot by experience! He joined the J. Walter Thompson Company, in London - an advertising and marketing company famous then on both sides of the Atlantic for their forward looking design work.

His career went from entry level design positions, to work in creative and management, to TV production. He came to Chicago originally for a couple of years on a company exchange program early in his career. And subsequently, for several years it seemed as though he had made a career of coming and going between the London and Chicago offices of the J.W.T. Company.

Finally, a permanent move to Chicago with his dear wife Ursel and children Julia, Marcus, and Carl, meant finding a new home, which turned out to be not too far from where the Chicago Botanical Gardens (CBG) were beginning to grow. Wildflowers bloomed all over their ravine that spring, plants he did not know. Which of course sparked conversations with neighbors, who seemed not to be able to identify them for him. And that led him to fall in love with the wildflowers of the Midwestern woods and prairies. As avocation and muse – it provided him a whole new chance to connect with like minds committed as he to native plants - the science and the art.

Where better to go for help identifying native plants than CBG, so near… Eventually, the connection led to teaching botanical art classes, and creating art exhibits, and, ca. 1998, the formation of the Reed-Turner Botanical Artists’ Circle, which is still going strong! His enthusiasm was echoed in his illustrated weekly columns - Greenfingers, Prairie Plants, and Woodland Wildflowers, devoted to opening the discussion about the importance of natives, to promoting awareness of and appreciation for native flora, and the conservation of wildflowers in general. He also created the illustrated column Plants at a Glance, a weekly column promoting indoor plants, with care and feeding tips, to nurture the indoor growing enthusiast. His columns ran in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago metropolitan editions of the Chicago Sun Times for over 20 years.

Eventually Derek joined the staff at the CBG, helping to begin and develop the advertising, communications and marketing programs, establishing their website presence, and creating their online “look.” He taught at CBG and Columbia College, Chicago. And if that were not enough, Derek and co- created, wrote, and designed eight cookbooks, originally published by Williams Collins in London (now part of Harper Collins), still available through the Internet.

Further evidence of his burgeoning avocation included founding the Midwest Center for Botanical Documentation, a visual archive of native plants of the Midwest. His lyrical pen and ink images of natives created for this collection are often composed to reflect their locations, mimicking the motion of the wind drifted hills and vales.

While working with CBG he discovered the American Society of Botanical Artists in 1996. He already had a full agenda in botanical art, but after his retirement, he began his support of ASBA through his art, his service as board member, executive committee member, and president of the board. He added writing articles for The Botanical Artist to his life, becoming instrumental in ASBA’s Wildflower Initiative, and starting the development of an ASBA Code of Ethics. He put people together whose common interests in botanical art and botany contributed to the growth of the genre and the botanical health of the plains. He was, and continues to be, clear that art does not exist in a vacuum, it must integrate itself into our lives.

His own artworks have been included in numerous ASBA exhibitions, one-man shows, and other miscellaneous exhibitions, and grace the collections of Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium, the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library (RHS Gold and Silver Gilt medals for individual displays), the British Museum, and the Library of Congress. He is a Fellow of The Linnaean Society of London. 

Recently, he and Ursel moved to Daphne, Alabama, near Mobile, to be near family and escape the long Midwest winter, which he believes starts in October and ends way too late. Not surprisingly, his true avocation – the one building connections – has found a home at the Mobile Botanic Gardens. In the few years since he arrived in the bay area, he has supported the growth of art classes and exhibitions in botanical art, outreach education in plant science, and botanical art and its role in the amazing history of the area (including Bartram’s presence in colonial/early national times - a fact well-known known to residents). He has organized the Coastal Alabama Botanical Artists' Circle. A current project is a class for students to create a series of individual flower images, inspired by a red, a white, and a blue flower. The resulting works form the basis of an exhibition in collaboration with the Mobile Museum of Art, “Red, White & Blue Exhibition – The Art of Celebrating History.”

Derek believes two words are key to the current trends in botanical art, and implicitly to his work - “…education and relevance.” Botanical art speaks persuasively and clearly to and for all the associated disciplines of botany, conservation, ecology, etc. His fervent belief in the connectedness of all things is eloquently stated:

“The concept of one picture is worth a thousand words gives a beautiful botanical painting of a flower the power to speak to the larger public audience in a way that botany and the other disciplines cannot. It has the ability to communicate so much instantaneously and at a very emotional level. Botanical art connects science to people with one finely tuned, articulate voice. And it draws us to plants, to conservation, and to a sense of awareness and concern that without plants we are nothing. All of which makes the subject of botanical art so enormously relevant - more relevant today, perhaps, than it has been for generations.”

So there you have it. Derek has spent his life building connections – people to people, plant to planters, art to artist. It’s been ASBA’s good fortune to be the beneficiary of his splendid avocations. Keep an eye out for that silver mane and great smile, it might just be the connection you need!