In the modern world, artists have started to use plants as inspiration for exploring the themes of life, growth, decay, and environmentalism. Such contemporary artists as Georgia O'Keeffe and Henri Rousseau managed to bring to the spotlight the use of plants as subjects of representation by which they enriched the themes and underlined the issues and meaning intended.
Removing flowers from their context, O'Keeffe created massive close-up views of abstracted plants so that the viewer could be deeply immersed in or nearly submerged within an intimate experience, like stepping into the surreal in a moment with nature.
On the contrary, to depict the density and even the mystery of the outer world, plants occupy central positions in dream-like landscapes conceived by Rousseau.
Artistic Representations of Botanics: Tradition of the Art Form
Botanical art is that which combines both, that of art and science. The style is an effort at drawing plants with phenomenal precision to capture their details to inform, educate, and awe the viewer. This ranges from the earliest botanical illustrations attempted as a quest to log species of plants for possible use by science to modern day botanical paintings that celebrate their place among pieces of art in their own right as emphasizing an inextricably tied relationship between botany and art.
