Bobbi Angell
In recent years Bobbi has been enjoying the intricate art of copper etching. Printmaking allows a natural extension of her compositional style with an enhanced focus on fine detail. Her graceful designs are drawn onto a ground on a copper plate, etched with acid, and hand printed individually in small editions. A select few are hand tinted with watercolor. Each image reflects a personal involvement with the subject, whether observed in the wild or selected from her extensive and rambling gardens.
Throughout her career, Bobbi’s focus has to illustrate scholarly texts with pen and ink drawings created expressly to aid identification of the plant species depicted. Using her botanical training, keen observational skills, and artistic sensibilities, she creates accurate, exquisitely detailed illustrations. Much of her work represents years of ongoing collaboration with scientists from The New York Botanical Garden and around the world, working from herbarium specimens, pickled flowers, photographs and her own field sketches. Her images are not only scientifically precise but also beautifully composed, even when they are reconstructions of flattened dried specimens. The clarity of the microscopic detail provides an intimate view of beauty that usually escapes the naked eye. With 30 years of continuous work and over 2000 species illustrated, Bobbi’s ink drawings compliment the pages of texts including Orchids of the Greater Antilles, Intermountain Flora, Vines of Puerto Rico, and Vascular Plants of Central French Guiana. Many botanists, when identifying a specimen, go straight to the illustrations rather than to the keys and descriptions, and those who use a flora illustrated by Bobbi often find that the work is worth contemplating for the pleasure of the illustrations alone.
