LARA CALL GASTINGER

2018 ASBA Botanical Illustrator Award for Excellence in Scientific Botanical Art

by Deborah Shaw

The botanical art, scientific illustrations, and sketchbooks of Lara Call Gastinger combine to express a deep sense of place. Lara’s scientific illustration endeavors are well-documented in the Flora of Virginia, a comprehensive and hefty (7 lbs!) description of nearly 3,200 native and naturalized plant species. Lara contributed approximately 1,300 plant illustrations for the book.

The Flora of Virginia Project was launched with the ambitious goal of creating a new flora for Virginia. The last one, Flora Virginica, was published in the mid-1700s.

While working on a master’s degree in plant ecology at Virginia Tech, Lara heard that a flora for Virginia was underway, and that an illustrator was needed. When she completed her master’s, she became chief illustrator for the Flora, and worked on the project for the next ten years. Lara viewed the Flora Project as an opportunity to engage in a daily practice of drawing plant specimens.

Born in Virginia Beach and educated in Virginia, Lara paints and draws from her studio in Charlottesville. Her participation in the Flora may have seemed serendipitous, but is a logical progression in her artistic journey. She was instinctively drawn to combining science and art with her undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Virginia, with a minor in architecture.

Scientific illustrators create an idealized portrait of a plant species in order to describe and identify. Where scientific illustration leaves off, botanical art begins—the desire to tell a story about a plant. Lara’s art allows her to illustrate plants and their relationships, to tell a story about their ecology, supported by an underlying educational component.

Many of Lara’s artworks use a monochromatic palette to focus on a plant’s structure, a logical extension of her interest in architecture, recast through a botanical lens. Lara also is known for her nature journaling sketchbooks that are fresh, lively, and engage others to join her in observing the natural world. Lara starts a unique journal when traveling, but keeps a perpetual journal year-round in Virginia. She starts by labeling each two-page spread with the dates for each week in a year. On any given day, she returns to the appropriate week in the journal to create small sketches. Over time, a spread may accumulate notes and drawings from multiple years. The beauty is in seeing the years unfold across the pages: camping each summer; recording blooming flowers; documenting changes. Fellow artists who want to try a perpetual journal soon discover an additional benefit: after the first year, they no longer have to face the dreaded “blank page.”

Lara has more than 50,000 followers on Instagram. As a 2018 New Year’s resolution, she explained to her followers how to start a perpetual journal using the hashtag #lgperpetualjournal. The response has been overwhelming and inspiring, as people all over the world create their own journals.

The components of Lara’s approach to art build upon one another: nature journaling to find inspiration and observe; scientific illustration to learn in depth; and botanical art to tell a story. Added to that is her passionate desire to reach out and engage young and old in observing nature all around us—even in the weeds growing through cracks in the sidewalk.

Lara has received two Gold Medals from the Royal Horticultural Society, and has shown in ASBA exhibitions. Her artwork is in the permanent collection of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. A teacher and a Virginia Master Naturalist, she volunteers in schools, teaching fifth and sixth graders about local botany and illustrating plants. She fiercely encourages nature-centric activities that do not involve a digital screen.

When asked to provide a favorite plant story for this article, Lara related how she had always wanted to witness skunk cabbages melting snow. In mid-January, she led her family through the cold, following directions from a fellow Master Naturalist, to locate a group of little skunk cabbages. Sitting in holes in the snow, the plants were demonstrating thermogenesis—creating internal heat to melt the snow around them. Lara knelt to sniff, to discover whether the plants exhibited their characteristic odor (they didn’t).

The final paragraph of Lara’s article about the project on ASBA’s website conveys the philosophy that led to this well-deserved award:

“As botanical artists and illustrators, it is our job to inspire the next generation with the beauty and complexity of our natural world…It is the goal of the Flora of Virginia project to inspire people about the flora in their own backyards, motivate to conserve our beautiful natural areas, and help us appreciate the gift of the plants that we tend to forget. In the words of Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum, ‘In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.’ ”