Skip to content

July 2022 Vol. 3, No.3

The Soul Cleansing Botanical Meditations of
Corinne Lapin-Cohen

botanical drawing of plant growing from coconut
Sprouting Coconut
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
40” x 24”

There is nothing more beautiful than nature …
Vincent Van Gogh

For truehearted nature lovers, nothing exceeds the beauty of the natural world. Usually, nature lovers appreciate manmade art and nature, as both provide humans a form of catharsis, a sanctuary from our daily lives and society. Nature is a place for healing. Nature and art both have positive impacts on our brains, bodies, feelings and thought processes. Both are calming to the human nervous systems and spirit. All the better when art and nature intersect.

The term ‘naturalism’ becomes contextually interesting as it offers duality in meaning. Naturalism is an art movement, a term used since the 17th century to refer to any artwork which depicts the subject-matter realistically. Simultaneously, the term is used for the scientific study of the natural world, by professionals or amateurs. Both naturalist definitions fit the botanical artist Corinne Lapin-Cohen, who resides in Katonah, New York.

botanical drawing of plant with purple flower
Hosta
Watercolor on calfskin vellum
28” x 20”

Prior to the ascent of photography in the mid-19th Century, flora and fauna was depicted by skilled etching artists, illustrators and painters. Illustrations of plants and animals in Europe began in the 1st Century A.D. in a book of remedies De materia medica of Dioscorides written by the Greek botanist Pedanius Dioscorides. Initially, these drawings helped readers identify plant species for medicinal purposes. Drawing from nature became popular for the illustrators of early printed herbals in the 16th Century, as plants and animals previously unknown were brought to Europe from newly explored regions of the world. Today, photography has essentially replaced painted or etched biological illustrations. Considering that photography has not become popular until the mid-1800s, botanical illustrators have had a 900-year run as a respected profession. There are still organizations that favor naturalist drawings and paintings, among them the renowned Audubon Society’s bird books. Nonetheless, in the 21st Century botanical art is a rare specialty, mostly driven by passion and dedication for the sub-genre and profound respect for traditions.

botanical drawing of plant with orange flower
Ad Reem Tulips
Watercolor on calfskin veiny vellum
14” x 14”

Among these rare contemporary practitioners, the botanical artist Corinne Lapin-Cohen’s work is special in its innate perfection. Her focus is naturalist depiction, but with a remarkable twist – her art has the magical quality of bringing the essence of the plants virtually alive on the two-dimensional picture plane. Her ultrarealistic paintings actually let you feel the inner essence of plants, transporting you into nature with an inexplicable illusory transcendence. Stunningly, the viewer is entranced with a profound soul-cleansing feeling, virtually identical to the experience of literally interacting with plants in nature.

Formal botanical illustrations are inextricably linked to science. Botanicals broach the gap between art and science, requiring tight discipline and adherence to traditional rules. The artist is bound to create a true and lifelike representation of a plant. Instead of unlimited creative freedom usually granted to fine artists, the serious botanical artist finds satisfaction, harmony and even joy in the process of order and discipline. Emphasis is on the structure and painstaking accuracy. For example, the dimensional size and colors must exactly match the living plant. The illustration must faithfully and accurately depict and represent the form, character and detail of a plant, with the precision and level of detail for it to be distinguished from other species. Often, the plant is depicted from various angles, including close ups of certain features. The difficulty of achieving this level of perfect realism should never be underestimated as the discipline requires highly developed artistic skills and immense patience.

botanical drawing of plant with orange flower
Naturalized Day Lilies
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
28” x 20”
botanical drawing of plant with orange and yellow flower
Rudbeckia
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
28” x 20”

For Lapin-Cohen, an artist and teacher, the slow process itself is a form of meditation, “When it takes you 60 hours to do a botanical painting – because you draw it first and then you do studies and then you work on a composition and then you finally get to your final piece, it is an emotional process, a connection with the plant. It’s meditative. The artist can put emotion into the importance of the plant. I think it’s necessary to convey their beauty, along with the science, to show their natural fragility. We are in a time that is also ephemeral. This process is the opposite. A plant grows, it matures, it dies, and it grows again… Nowadays, there is an emphasis on the need for preservation, the need to be protectors of the environment for the new generation. It is no longer just an emphasis on technique or the perfect rendering of a perfect leaf. It’s about the insect holes, it’s about the deterioration.”

botanical drawing of plant
Passionflower
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
30” x 22”
botanical drawing of plant with blue and purple flower
Nikko Blue Hydrangea
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
19’ x 14”
botanical drawing of plant with pink flowers
Moonlight Lady Orchid
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
15” x 12”
botanical drawing of green leaves and purple beans
Hyacinth Bean
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
13” x 11”
botanical drawing yellow-green leaves
Ginkgo biloba
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
13” x 11”
botanical drawing of yellow-orange flower
Bird of Paradise
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
20” x 15”

It’s about the need to see us as part of the flora –
not separated from it…”

botanical drawing of plant with purple flower
Chicory
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
15” x 12”
botanical drawing of plant with pink cone flower
Echinacea
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
15” x 12”

She uses pencil, ink and watercolors, and sometimes oil paint. Often she utilizes silverpoint for her drawings. This technique uses a special stylus of metal – silver, gold or copper, instead of graphite, on specially prepared paper. That was the material used in the very early traditional botanicals by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael. To achieve the correct plant color, as required by the scientific side of the discipline, she layers watercolors and does not mix colors. Fellow artists will understand how extraordinarily difficult that is, as the color needs to match the natural color of the plant exactly. She paints a layer of color and then adds more layers, until she achieves a perfect match of color and the subtle touch to properly mirror light, shades, textures and dimensionality. She essentially implements a mathematical formula without the benefit of having an actual formula. In commercial color printing, for example, the four-color process is the basis of creating all other colors, measured by a precise percentage formula combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Corinne Lapin-Cohen in studio

Lapin-Cohen has no such advantage. This skill and discipline requires decades of practice, in Lapin-Cohen’s case since 1994. She divulges her process as, “I glaze one color over another. They’re all transparent colors and single pigments. Your eye goes through the paint to the light of the paper, or the vellum, the light comes back and you see what you see. If I put a bit of yellow over a bit of blue, your eye will see and read green. If I’m layering different yellows and blues, shading and coloring and giving dimension – your eye sees this mixture, but it doesn’t know it’s a mixture – it just reads reds and blues and greens in the shadow, in the highlight, in the mid tone. I have an idea of what colors I may have used, but I don’t have a formula.”

Lapin-Cohen’s introduction to art started early, “Until I was 10, I grew up in New York City. Then we moved out to East Meadow on Long Island and that’s where I grew up until I went off to college. My earliest recollection of loving art was when I was about three or four years old and my mom took me to classes at the Museum of Modern Art where I took fingerpainting classes. I remember when I put my hands into red paint and blue paint and the magic happened of purple. It was as though it was magic – there’s no other word for it – this miracle happened on this piece of paper where these two colors made a new color. Afterwards my mom and I would walk through the museum looking at paintings and after that and I was screaming from delight every time I saw purple in a painting.”

botanical drawing of corn
Indian Corn
Watercolor on calfskin veiny vellum
15” x 12”
botanical drawing of plant with yellow flower
Peter Pan Zucchini
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
8” x 6”
botanical drawing of walnut
Walnut
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
6″ x 5″

She studied at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, majoring in the history of fine art with a core in art, and double-majored in education because her parents wouldn’t allow her to “just be an artist.” She taught in public elementary school in Philadelphia and eventually moved to Mount Vernon, New York, where she also taught in public school. She continued on to the College of New Rochelle for art and sculpture classes and started working on a master’s degree in Environmental Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Her path to botanical art started in the 1970s while working for the Audubon Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she wrote and led programs in early childhood and children’s education. Often she sketched the plants on the nature walks, finding her path of combining her love of nature and plants with art and science. In 1993, she started her formal training in botanical art at the New York Botanical Gardens. After her program ended in 1995, she started to teach at the same program. She also taught at various organizations and institutions until she realized “It just was too much. It was more teaching than painting and I really didn’t want to be a teacher who painted; I wanted to be a painter who could teach.”

botanical drawing
Heritage Tomatoes
Watercolor on hot press watercolor paper
9” x 18”
botanical drawing
Abies bifolia
Watercolor on calfskin vellum
5” x 8”

Her relationship to the plant subject is paramount in the process, “I think most botanical artists love the plant that they’re working with, whether it’s for a scientific purpose or because they’ve chosen it. My personality is one of excitement and joy of what I do with life, and I see in every plant this little miracle of life, this celebration of being alive. I try to capture something about that and the commemorative value of that plant. When I pick a plant to paint, I thank the plant for allowing me to paint it. Because it takes so long, I get very involved with knowing the plant – its structure, the petals, the leaves, the way it all fits together. Each plant is unique. I think my work has an emotional quality to it. I need to be able to feel something – not just visually.”

painting
Worm’s Eye View
Oil paint and botanical materials on canvas
25” x 31”

The hard skills needed to accomplish this level of perfection starts with drawing. “In botanical art there’s just no way you can paint what you can’t draw first. You have to be able to draw accurately and give full dimension and full form, full total drawings before you can paint, because the painting is only color on a total drawing. You have to be able to draw first and create beautiful renderings in black and white. That takes huge amounts of practice. It’s done, again, with layers from graphite – one single tone of pencil. You need to be able to layer and gradually tone from very dark to the white of the paper and back into the mid-tones again. It’s done by putting very slow light marks on the paper; but mostly it’s done through observation. You have to look at your plant and be able to train your eye and your hand to move together. There’s an innate love to want to do this for people when they come to me.”

botanical drawing twigs
Totems, Homage to Blossfeldt
Silverpoint on Plike paper
12” x 9”
botanical drawing of yellow flower
Sunflower
Oil paint, silverpointe on canvas
40” x 30”

Besides her botanical artistry, Lapin-Cohen pursues various fine art projects outside of the scientific realm. She loves horses and was former competitor and equestrian trainer of hunters and jumpers.

She approaches her art with optimism, “I am realistic and I feel really fortunate to be alive, fortunate to be able to celebrate what I do. To celebrate life, you’ve got to find the things that make you happy and really pursue them with gusto.”

Evidently, Corinne Lapin-Cohen found what she loves. Looking at her botanicals allows the viewer to also share the wonderous, boundless feeling of love – for the plant, nature and life.