Human Flower Project

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Continuous Narrative: Flowers and Insects

A new exhibition of paintings shows how flowering plants of the East Coast U.S. live in symbiosis with fluttering insects.

Catalpa and Hawkmoth (Ceratomia catalpae)

by Mindy Lighthipe

Image: via Mindy Lighthipe

Thanks to Mindy Lighthipe—artist, naturalist, organizer—we can alert you to a rare exhibit of botanical art. “Butterflies, Moths, & Pollinating Insects of the East Coast” opened Monday at the Frelinghuysen Arboretum in Morristown, New Jersey. And please don’t let its generic title put you off. These 42 paintings, by 32 skilled artists, are lively and provocative, a dramatic illustration of survival as the dance of interdependency. Each painting shows how the life of a particular moth or butterfly species hovers around a specific flowering plant.

“It is impossible to do this with photography,” Lighthipe says, since “often the different stages of a plant and/or insect are not happening at the same time.” With the same technique of “continuous narrative” that Masaccio used to convey episodes in the life of Christ, these painters (all members of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators— Greater NY), tell stories too.  Lighthipe says that “Each artist chose an insect and then researched its life cycle, habits and specific relationship with the plant world. Many of the artists raised the insects and grew the plants,” she adds. Lighthipe herself produced four paintings to show the braided lives of passionvine and the Zebra Longwing.

Generally, insects depend on specific plants for food and congenial habitats. In their turn, plants rely on the insects they host to disperse pollen—i.e. sex. (Our father has always contended that in addition to food, shelter and sex, there exists another fundamental need, and that’s the right to say “I told you so.” We hope that Mindy or others will tell us how the symbiosis between plants and insects meets this necessity.)

Hummingbird Clearwing Moth (Hemeris thysbe) by April Flaherty

“Butterfly bushes, red bee balm and Casa Blanca lilies are their favorites

in my garden,” Flaherty writes.

Image: via Mindy Lighthipe



To see all the paintings, check this website, courtesy of Mindy Lighthipe. And if you’re close enough to Morristown, New Jersey, to visit the Freylinghuysen Arboretum, make sure to see the exhibit itself, running through Halloween. Many thanks to Judy Glattstein for the intellectual pollination.