Descendant, 1999; oil paint, alkyd on panel, by Isabella Kirkland
Isabella Kirkland, the artist I wrote about who makes intricate paintings in the style of Dutch Masters memorializing nature’s rarest plants and animals, answered a few lingering questions by e-mail this morning, and her responses are worth sharing.
Q. What prompted you to focus your work on species’ comings and goings (and returns)? And why this particular style of painting?
A. At the end of the millennium, I started thinking about what might be here for the citizens of the world in 2, 3, or 400 years. The Dutch still-life paintings from 1650-1720 are astoundingly accurate and well-preserved. You can still type to species many of the bugs and flowers. …NASA would have to re-create all of the original science for another Moon shot (none of the hardware or software of the time was saved)…. The idea that digital platforms are stable is sort of laughable. The inks we now use in printing are very transitory. So I started out just to document some of the rare and exquisite things we happen to barely have at this time and date in as permanent a form as possible, with a nod to a future that may NOT still have them.
Q. (Ms. Kirkland’s work is displayed on www.isabellakirkland.com in a way that allows visitors to zoom in and learn details of individual species with an elaborate key.) How did you come up with the zooming and keyed approach to showing your work on the Web?
A. I found the software for zooming into the keys and paintings on the Pierpont Morgan Library Web site. It was called Zoomify. I bought it and have since
been trying to update my site. Unfortunately, Zoomify has been bought out and bundled into someone else’s software package that I have not been able to track down. For an exhibit I did at the Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts in San Francisco, I made laminated cards with the keys, species lists and stories of some of the species illustrating various aspects of each of the subjects of the pictures (i.e., endangerment,
invasiveness, etc.) so I already had the background work done to put Zoomify to use.
[Zoomify got in touch about their software; see below.]
Q. (Her painting “Descendant” is on the cover of “The Future of Life” by the Pulitzer-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson.) How did Dr. Wilson or his publisher find you?
A. I exhibited my work in a butterfly show at the Harvard Natural History Museum (next to the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the glass flowers). Dr. Wilson was walking around the show with Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz (both friends of mine) and they told him that everything was at life size, putting every species into proper relative scale. (I reference the original description usually, and often see specimens at museums too.) That got his attention. I ended up at the MCZ because another friend of mine (and collector now) has a sister named Nomi Pierce who is a blue butterfly expert. She works closely and often with Dr Wilson.
Q. I was particularly struck by your painting “Back” (which shows species that returned from near extinction or showed up after being presumed extinct). Over all, do you have a sense that nature’s fabric is more durable than some give it credit for?
A. Andrew, the more I learn, the more I fear that the fabric of the world is very fine indeed. We have already rent magnificent holes in it. While I’m certain that something will survive, after a fashion, nature abhorring a vacuum, I am afraid the stupendous intricacy one sees in a complex ecosystem will be reduced to something far simpler. EVERYTHING I have been learning suggests that our world is FAR more complex than we assume, not less.
Dr. Peter Warshall (great ecologist, birder, desert denizen, Bio-neer, Northern Jaguar Alliance, author working on a book about color and vision in nature, etc) was telling me (and I wish I had taken proper notes and references) that he had read an article in a technical biology journal of some sort showing that the DNA of a ancient bacterium had been absorbed into the DNA of the host creature, and that on further looking we may find that creatures are constantly acquiring whole sections of DNA by some unknown process. IF this is true, then our world is EVEN MORE COMPLEX again by some order of millions.
If you look at the life history of just one insect, Britain’s large blue butterfly, you have a perfect illustration of the kind of complexity I mean. It seems to me that if we could look that closely at any ecosystem, we would find the same level of INTER-involvement of soil, plants, bugs, birds, herbivores, microbes, etc. — macro and micro.
At some point in the future I would like to work on this subject of extreme complexity, but I have no idea how yet.
[From Zoomify: Zoomify has not been bought out. We’re still here working hard on our new version – v4, a complete rewrite for Flash CS3 and Actionscript 3.0. As for being bundled, Photoshop CS3 gained the ability to export ‘zoomified’ images and includes our simple, free viewer (a tiny Flash movie). Also, Aperio is our exclusive reseller for digital pathology. We have many other partnerships, but they all complement our continuing to sell and develop our products ourselves. Hope this information is helpful, David Urbanic, President, Zoomify, Inc.]
Comments are no longer being accepted.