A letter from the Editor

Dear Friends:
For those of you who have been working with me over the past several years, you are by now familiar with my “Perplexi®” and “Matrix Theory” both based on the idea of linear perspective and aerial perspective. These ideas based on 15th century conclusions by Florentine architects and Leonardo DaVinci have been enormously helpful in developing our craft as Botanical Artists and as artists in general.

Our task of revealing observed images begins with understanding first what we are looking at and then how to portray those visions. Classical art lives by rules, which we are welcome to break, but somehow the disobeying of these rules comes more easily when we understand what they are to begin with.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently housing an exhibition of the drawings of Leonardo DaVinci. Carmen Bamback, curator of the department of drawings and prints, together with the department chairman George Goldner, has pulled together drawings by the artist from the Vatican Museum, Windsor Castle, the Louvre, and the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice to name a few. Her intent is to reveal how he thinks, communicates, and educates.

Leonardo’s legacy was to think of subjects in terms of three-dimensional perspective, whether it is a building or a face. The principles of rendering form across multiple planes are the principles of the “matrix theory.” I hope you will have an opportunity to visit this exhibit and then go back to your drawing boards with a new view toward rendering subjects so that they take up a depth of space.

If you’re in New York, be sure to visit the Morgan Library’s first exhibition devoted to botanical and zoological illustration. It is on display from February 12 to May 4, 2003.

Happy Spring. God bless. OM

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY
OF BOTANICAL ARTISTS (ASBA)
Calling for artists and art students
to join its now forming
Sarasota Florida Chapter.

Olivia Marie Braida Chiusano: gojolly@comcast.net

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