Botanical artist Kathleen McKeehen shares in an age-old scientific tradition.
In science illustrator Kathleen McKeehen’s portfolio, there is a watercolor that seems to sum up her field.
A wing and skull rest against a John James Audubon sketch reproduced by McKeehen, his line drawing of a kestrel the background for her rendering of the bird’s parts.
In the same spirit, the history of scientific illustration is layered into every painting McKeehen shows at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts through April, even when the layers aren’t so visible.
Contemporary scientific illustration is linked to a tradition intact for centuries. Scientific illustrators worked in the 16th century, feeding the Renaissance interest in the natural world. They sailed with the Western explorers, cataloguing plants, insects and animal life.
“Sydney Parkinson sailed with Captain Cook in the late 1700s, until he died,” McKeehen said. “It was kind of a dangerous job, but it was the way they had of recording the sciences.”
While the perils are fewer today, McKeehen’s route to her second career was still arduous. She had taught for a quarter of a century when she enrolled in a class taught by noted Seattle botanical illustrator Louise Smith.
“She suggested it might be something I could make a living at,” McKeehen said. “She told me I should apply to the science illustration program at University of California-Santa Cruz. And I got in.”
McKeehen followed a condensed, one-year program “seven days a week, 12 hours a day.”
She learned to build a single leaf with 40 painstaking layers of watercolor on hard paper durable enough to stand up to the washes.
“It’s dry brush and washes, dry brush and washes,” she said. “It intensifies the colors slowly.”
She drew Pittosporum spissescens, a plant so tiny that McKeehen had to use a microscope to see its blossoms.
To render a plant accurately, McKeehen learned to work with the visual plane, measuring what she saw, rather than the actual dimensions.
“That leaf may be a certain size, but if it’s coming at me at an angle I would measure the foreshortened leaf on a vertical plane,” she said. “It’s pretty tricky. When artists sight along a pencil, that’s what they’re doing.”
McKeehen struggled to generalize forms, when her subjects moved or died.
After graduating from Santa Cruz, she did an internship at the Royal Botanic Gardens – also known as Kew Gardens – 300 acres on the Thames in southwest London. Founded in the 1600s, the gardens are perhaps most noted for their 19th century glass wonders, the Palm House and the Temperate House.
The Herbarium where McKeehen worked houses the world’s largest collection of the aromatic plants.
“There’s one new floor, the top floor, but all the rest is (made of) iron railings and little cubby holes full of plants and they’re from all over the world,” she said.
McKeehen worked in a room with big windows overlooking the Thames. Fellow botanical artists gathered there with her included venerable Margaret Mee, still traveling the Amazon in her eighties to collect specimens, draw and paint.
“There are a lot of people from South America, Central America there to study, because that area of the world is so big for botany,” McKeehen said. “So we would just sit and talk and paint all day. It was a wonderful time. There were a lot of neat people doing work they loved with plants.”
McKeehen produced black-and-white drawings for the botanists’ publication, Kew Bulletin, and for Curtis Magazine.
“I didn’t get any color work into Curtis because I had trouble with the paper,” she said. “We had to use a softer paper, so I was really struggling with the watercolor there. I would try to do my ‘many layers’ and the paper would fall apart.”
Now, four years later, McKeehen has gained self-confidence, setting aside her double-ought brushes to work faster with a Windsor Newton “Series 7.” She has joined the American Society of Botanical Artists, and a Northwest branch of that organization.
She is making a living – although not yet a princely one.
“My goal is to double my income every year,” she said. “And so far I have.”
Current projects include illustrations for a Lewis and Clark series that encompasses board games, posters, card games, advertising and activity books.
She does patent drawings, and has found clients through the Guild of Scientific Illustrators.
McKeehen believes that with the resurgence of realism over the last two decades, scientific illustration has also become more acceptable again as an art form.
“Which is good,” she said, “because, even as a kid, I knew I had to do the realistic stuff.”
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Kathleen McKeehen and Rosalyn Gale Powell show “Flora,” April 3-May 2 at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts. Other gallery exhibits: Mary Balcomb; Terry Samilson; and a group show “The Vase.”
BAC hosts workshops through the month; call 842-3132 for more information.
