Featured Artist Jennifer Bass

Artist Jennifer Bass presents a portfolio of botanical paintings drawn from her experience as an herbalist. See more by visiting her website.

 

 

I grew up in the studio of my mother. She was a painter who would put me on her knees and let me paint the grass on her large intricate landscapes. Many of my ancestors were artists, and I carry on their need to center life around creative practice.

 

 

My paintings are born from my lifestyle as an herbalist, a way of life that started in my childhood. I grew up on a large farm in Virginia, surrounded by a magnificent garden of roses, irises, fruit trees, vegetables, and ancient oaks.

 

 

Often my paintings center on plants from my own garden or the forest nearby. These are plants I have relationships with as food, medicine, teachers, and friends.

 

 

I paint in my home studio, located within our botanical sanctuary on a steep mountainside in Western North Carolina. Studying plants directly by noticing their tiny details allows me to open myself to the plants’ whispers, to express gratitude for their medicine, and to know them in a different way than memorizing their uses.

 

 

This body of work is a fusion of passions, painting and crafting plant medicine. Decades of studying herbalism from local teachers, books, and more recently within the traditions of my ancestors, has led me to spend more time in direct communication with the plants.

 

 

The act of painting the plants I grow or live near is an act of care and reverence. The importance of having a relationship with the medicinal plants before even thinking of taking a harvest is central. I feel that in deepening my awareness of the textures, colors, patterns, and quality of edges within the plant world, my practice as an herbalist grows like a river becoming the wide-open ocean.

 

 

Instead of portraying the plant isolated on a blank page as is most common in botanical art, I prefer to surround them with their environment, honoring the interconnection in ecological relationships.

 

 

The process of creating this body of work is an intimate conversation with invisible worlds, with places far past and forward in my own lineage. Working with plant medicine can open the deepest hidden mysteries with an ancient key.

 

 

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