Spring Art Classes at New York Botanical Garden
Spring Classes are starting at New York Botanical Garden. Wendy Hollender will
be teaching some of the classes.
For those of you who have never taken a class before and would like to get
a sense of what botanical drawing is all about this two day workshop is a great
way to start. No past experience necessary. A love of nature is a plus.
Program Coordinator at New York Botanical Garden
Wendy Hollender has been named the new Program Coordinator for Botanical Art and Illustration at the New York Botanical Garden. The Program coordinator works with the Continuing Education department to develop the relevant curriculum as it relates to their particular field and is available for student counseling as it relates to course work.
Wendy holds a BFA in textile design from the Rhode Island School of Design and earned a Certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration at the Garden. She is a founder of WH Art & Design and has taught in the program since fall, 2003.
Botanical Drawing Workshop at Westchester CC
Join Botanical Artist Wendy Hollender on Friday, April 27, 2007, 9:30am to 3:30pm for a one day workshop on botanical drawing.
Drawing plants and flowers starts with observation. Developing your ability to see detail and translate your observations to paper takes practice. Mastering basic skills of scientific illustration drawing will help take away some of the confusion and mystery of making realistic and dimensional looking drawings.
In this one day workshop, students will learn techniques of toning from light to dark to create the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface as well as techniques of perspective drawing used in making realistic drawings of flowers. Students will work in graphite pencil on drawing paper.
Fee for students currently enrolled at Westchester Community College: $100 Ref. Ref: #A509. Others: $125 Ref. #A510. A complete schedule for art courses and special workshops can be found here.
If you are interested contact:
Westchester Community College
Westchester Art Workshop
White Plains
914-606-7500
waw@sunywcc.edu
Wendy now Features on BotanicalArtists.com
Wendy is now featured on as a Botanical Artist on botanicalartists.com. See her profile as well as a few new paintings.
Wendy Hollender has two new Botanical Paintings in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium Society Exhibition: Portraits of a Garden III September 9 – November 5, 2006.
Come see Wendy Hollender’s latest work at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is part of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium Society’s Exhibit. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium Society is a group of the country’s most accomplished botanical artists, which works in reinventing the centuries-old form of florilegia. The multiyear project aims to document Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s living collections through botanical art and preserve the same plants in their 250,000-specimen herbarium. More information on the exhibit and Florilegia can be found on Brooklyn Botanic Garden website: http://bbg.org/lib/florilegium/
September 8 and 9. Botanical Workshop with Wendy Hollender. New York botanical artist Wendy Hollender will visit campus the of Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA from September 6-10 to extend her creative work to plants of the prairie region and share her blend of scientific illustration and artistry with Grinnell audiences. The Center for Prairie Studies is sponsoring Ms. Hollender’s visit, which will include a public presentation, “Artist Demonstration, My Techniques for Creating Botanical Art in Colored Pencils,” on Friday, September 8, 4:15 p.m. in A.R.H. 102. On Saturday, September 9, she will lead a limited enrollment workshop on “Drawing for the Naturalist” from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Conard Environmental Research Area. To register for this workshop, contact the Center at 269-4720 or vanwyk@grinnell.edu. An exhibition of Ms. Hollender’s work is on view at Burling Library, Lower Level, through September.
“Plant morphology fascinates me,” says Wendy Hollender. “Examining flowers under the microscope opens up a whole world of possibilities for inspiration. Nature is a perfectionist when it comes to the arrangement of color and form.” Through her work as a commercial artist creating floral designs for clients such as Wedgwood China and Westpoint Stevens, Ms. Hollender became intrigued with the complex beauty of plants. Since 2002 she is a full time Botanical Artist and Illustrator.
Ms. Hollender is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. She also earned a certificate of botanical illustration from the New York Botanical Garden, where she teaches botanical art and illustration. She is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists, the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium Society.
Currently her clients include the New York Botanical Garden, the French beauty company Coty Inc., the Riverside Park Fund, the Morven Garden and Museum, and the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. She painted the walls of one of New York City’s finest Italian restaurants, Cesca, with inspiration from ancient frescos, vegetables and architectural details of Italy. In May of 2004 she painted botanical frescos at Villa Il Sogno in Tuscany, Italy (www.villailsogno.com).
Recent exhibitions of her work have been
More event information can be found on Grinnel College’s website.
Botanical Drawing Workshop in Trinidad and Tobago with Wendy Hollender
January 28- February 4, 2007 or March 26- April 2, 2007
Limited Space Available.
I recently returned from a trip to Trinidad and Tobego to work on a collection of tropical botanical illustrations. I am intrigued by tropical plants,the foods, herbal remedies, and exotic beauty we get from these plants of the Rain Forest.
After years of sketching on vacation in a warm climate, I found an ideal setting for a Botanical Workshop in the Rain Forest.
Imagine having lush flowering and fruiting plants at your fingertips, yet still have the comfort of a comfortable roof over your head and delicious local food served at each meal. It’s a way to work intensely on drawing and studying tropical plants, and experience the natural beauty of the Rain Forest in a relaxed manner. The staff at Asa Right Nature Center is friendly, knowledgeable, and the food prepared in the kitchen is delicious. Each day starts with coffee and tea on the veranda at 6am for those wanting to get a look at the morning birds, breakfast at 7:30am, lunch at noon, tea at 3pm, rum punch at 6pm and dinner at 7pm. In between we work, hike, and swim. We will also spend two nights at the beautiful Blue Waters Inn on Tobega to draw the beach flora and snorkel in some of the worlds best snorkeling. The natural reef on Tobago is literally a botanical garden underwater!
Interchurch Exhibit Covered in Gallery and Studio Magazine
Hollender: The Glory of Humility Before Nature’s
Bounty
Riverside Park looked like a big bucolic salad on the brilliant Spring day that we went to take notes on Wendy Hollender’s recent exhibition “Riverside Park and Beyond” at The Interchurch Center’s Corridor Gallery, 475 Riverside Drive. Having the Park blooming so lushly right across the street from the gallery gave one an even greater appreciation for Hollender’s meticulously rendered and annotated botanical drawings and equally detailed oils on linen– as well as for the unseen riches within the park itself; for her workdelineated the intricate variety of plant species beyond the verdant veil, so to speak.Although some works included were inspired by the flora of locales as distant as Cinque Terre, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Sea Island, Georgia, the main focus of the show was Riverside Park, since Hollender has lived in its vicinity for over twenty-five years. She began by painting landscapes there but for the past eight years has focused exclusively on botanical illustration in order, as she puts it in her artist’s statement, “to communicate my personal
experience in a work of art so that others can see as I do the uncommon beauty of a common plant.”
In an era when subjectivity and sensationalism are so prevalent, it takes uncommon humility for an artist as skillful as Hollender to subdue the interpretive impulse, eschew expressive flourishes, and subordinate her artistic vision so completely to the factual transcription of natural forms. Yet in doing so, Hollender reminded us of one of our favorite exhibitions of this past season: the splendid show of intimate landscapes in watercolor by the British visionary Samuel Palmer, a contemporary of Blake, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. For even without taking the same romantic liberties as Palmer, Hollender
manages, for all her insistence on botanical accuracy, to invest her pictures with similar intensities of feeling.
While a few were in oil on linen or watercolor, most of Hollender’s works were in colored pencil, a medium she handles with exquisite finesse. That the drawings and paintings were displayed behind glass, in window-like openings in the walls of the gallery or , in the case of some drawings, in sketchbooks
laid flat in vitrines, encouraged the viewer to study them closely and read the artist’s neatly penciled notes on the plants, which were not only informative, but added to their intimate visual appeal. Exhibited along with the drawings and paintings were actual botanical specimens, such as seeds, nuts, berries,
and dried leaves, that suggested an “installation, albeit of a more intimate, sedate, and scholarly kind than that word usually implies when used in the context of a contemporary art exhibition.
That said, the chief pleasures of Wendy Hollender’s show were aesthetic, owing to the austere beauty of her technique, portrait-like delineation of each plant’s salient characteristics and her way of making seemingly casual elements cohere compositionally. Especially pleasing was her oil on linen “Allamanda cathartica (Allamanda),” where the restraint of here style let the innate sensuality of the green leaves and yellow flowers speak for itself, and where the addition of a tiny “lubber grasshopper” (its specific species duly noted in the artist’s neat script) traversing a slender stem, added sudden animation to Hollender’s especially exacting species of still life painting.
-J. Sanders Eaton
Solo Exhibit Opening on April 6 in New York City
THE INTERCHURCH CENTER
Corridor Gallery
475 Riverside Drive at 120th Street
New York, NY 10115
212-870-2200
www.INTERCHURCH-CENTER.ORG for Directions
Wendy Hollender
Riverside Park and Beyond
Botanical Drawings in Colored Pencil and Paint
April 6 - May 12, 2006
Reception Tuesday April 11, 4 - 7 P.M.
On the day of the reception only: FREE PARKING
in the Building garage at 61 Claremont Ave. after 4:30 P.M.
* Enter at 61 Claremont Ave. after 5 P.M.
Gallery Hours: Mon. - Fri., 9 A.M. - 5 P.M.
2006 Botanical Calendar Gets Recommendation from Ann Raver in the New York Times
“The Riverside Park Fund in New York has produced a 2006 calendar beautifully illustrated by Wendy Hollender, a botanical artist, who can see the park from her West Side window and even tells you where to find the snowdrops in January; $20 at riversideparkfund.org or (212) 870-3070.”
Read the whole story at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/garden/15cutt.html