Picture Profile 2418: “Juniper—is it an Aril?”© Juniperus communis for ABA Worldwide Botanical Exhibition 2025. Artist Code 2418. ORIGINAL Water colour on Aquarelle Arches 100% cotton rag 140lbs size 16” x 12”. Started May 2024, completed 8th January 2025.
The Association of Botanical Artists are joining in the 2025 World Wide Day of Botanical Art exhibition, arranged by Botanical Art Societies the world over. The inaugural exhibition was 18 May 2018. The 2025 exhibition focusses on “Crop Diversity” to celebrate the biodiversity in crops that have been closely associated with the human species over thousands of years. The British organisers are the Society of Botanical Artists, Birmingham Society of Botanical Artists, Wales Society of Botanical Illustrators and the Eden Project Florilegium Society. Artwork for the British exhibition was subject to selection and the physical exhibition will be at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists gallery. All selected artwork will be viewed simultaneously online to an international audience.
I thought that Juniper would make a marvellous contribution and I arranged with Cambridge University Botanic Gardens to access their native plants, from which I resourced and designed my painting. There are three stages to submission: Stage 1 was registering an interest to exhibit and sending in a digital version of my artwork; Stage 2 is physical judging and I am excited to say that my little painting made it to this stage! Stage 3 is the Judges’ final selection and successful entries will be notified 7th March 2025.
I misread the instructions and was asked by the judges to remove my magnification numbers and add scale bars instead (which makes sense when they are being viewed in all sorts of ways). I managed to do this and to erase my original pencil markings without any damage!
This was an extremely fiddly plant to portray: it has male and female plants, so it was a large learning curve on my part. But I do quite like the finished piece and hope it succeeds. It will be a nice painting for other exhibitions, if it is declined for the worldwide exhibition.