Forces Of Nature

Newcastle Herald

Saturday March 1, 2008

BEN QUINN

Herbert Heinrich had good reason to be thunderstruck.

Fungus.

But not just any garden-variety fungus that grows on trees. The Novocastrian nature artist had been searching for this particular type for almost a decade. Like a Crusader searching for the Holy Grail, he was starting to wonder whether his faith might prove futile.

When the slippery species appeared like a divine vision during a routine field excursion, Heinrich felt like his heart would beat clear out of his chest.

"Back when I was an art student I actually depicted a fungus that I couldn't find anywhere in the natural world," he tells Weekender.

"I needed it for this story I was illustrating, so I had to copy it from other sources.

"The next nine years I spent countless hours searching for this fungus. I finally found it at Dove Lake, below Cradle Mountain, in Tasmania. I was very, very happy. Ecstatic, actually."

Heinrich was hiking with his partner, Anne Llewellyn, a fellow nature artist of repute and conjoint senior lecturer in natural history illustration at Newcastle University.

"This particular fungus grows on only one species of beech tree, so to see it in a location where it was actually festooning an entire tree was quite splendid," she recalls.

"It looked like fairy lights all the way down the bark of the tree. We were terribly excited."

The memory brings a smile to Heinrich's lips. "It's difficult to drag yourself away when you make a discovery like that," he says.

An engineer by trade, Heinrich quit BHP in the early 1980s to pursue his passion for nature.

He has become "a bit of an expert" at spending more time in the field than the art studio. Central Australia is almost a second home.

"Field work is absolute magic to most of us," he says.

"You develop a thirst for observing new things all the time. Most of us have collections well beyond our ability to render them as art."

Heinrich and Llewellyn are among more than 30 artists featured in Drawn From Nature, an exploration of Australian flora and fauna as seen through the eyes of past and present students at Newcastle University.

The exhibition is dedicated to the late Professor Graham Gilchrist, who pioneered the university's bachelor of natural history illustration program in 1979.

Unique in Australia and one of only a few offered internationally, the course has attracted students from around Australia and countries such as New Zealand, the United States, Brazil, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Greece and Bermuda.

"Natural history illustration is a bridge between art and science, though the visual representation and observation of nature has been practised in Australia for over 50,000 years," Llewellyn explains.

"Expeditionary art saw the likes of Sydney Parkinson from Cook's Endeavour voyage credited with some of the earliest recording by a European of hundreds of Australian species of plants and animals. Unfortunately Parkinson did not survive the voyage and did not see his momentous body of work published.

"The empowering thing about this type of art is that you're recording important historical facts for posterity. A piece of artwork rendered by your hand can last hundreds of years and even outlive the subjects.

"When you view the works of [William] Paterson and picture the huge bluegums covering Hexham and red cedars in abundance along the Hunter River, you really wonder what we've done to our environment."

Students from the Newcastle program are dedicated to the preservation of Australia's flora and fauna.

"Though the advent of digital photography provides us with a new means to document and observe nature, the meticulous and accurate depiction necessary for scientific illustration is still relevant today," Llewellyn continues.

"With climate change and global warming, there has possibly never been a time in human history when interpreting and depicting the natural world is more essential."

Graduates from the program are working nationally and internationally to aid this cause through their illustrations for children's books and scientific journals in various fields, including archaeology and palaeontology.

Ros Earp never dreamed so many career opportunities would present themselves when she signed up for the course in 2000.

Ask for her potted artistic history and you get an interesting answer.

"Funnily enough, I was a potter," Earp laughs.

"When I applied for the course they wanted to see my portfolio, but all I had was some homemade pots."

Earp has a science degree with a major in geology. Her mother was a botanical artist and most of her family have been involved in environmental work.

"I feel it's important to have that environmental background so when you're drawing something you know how leaves are attached, or how a plant is structured, or how species are related to each other," she says.

"I have absolutely no passion for anything else. When I'm sitting at my drawing board I can be captivated for seven or eight hours straight. It's wonderful to just go out and observe. That's what this artistic discipline teaches you patience and observation.

"The best part is searching for specific subjects. For example, a certain type of banksia grows only in the Myall Lakes, so I go up for a day, pick it, bring it home in a bucket of water and stick it in the fridge. You have to work very quickly with living things because they move, they change, they die. It can be very difficult to capture the essence of a subject in that sense."

Luke Davies, 23, is one of the younger brigade being drawn in greater numbers to the Newcastle course.

Davies commenced his studies in 2004. He was at a crossroads and never saw much of a future in natural illustration. How wrong he was.

"Working alongside so many talented students really inspires you and gets the blood pumping," says Davies, whose favourite haunts are Blackbutt Reserve and Awabakal Nature Reserve.

"I love birds and scientific drawings. I'm working on a black-breasted buzzard that could easily become my favourite. I love the attitude of it. It's very rewarding when you study things in such intricate detail."

? Drawn From Nature at Newcastle Region Library's Lovett Gallery until March 22.

"The empowering thing about this type of art is that you're recording important historical facts for posterity. A piece of artwork rendered by your hand can last hundreds of years."

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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