Her lines, careful and full of intention, smoothly flow from thick to fine, creating a sense of animation. But now she knows how to imbue them with new life. She continued to work for Lyman on the weekends and during the summers, and that became her training as a botanical illustrator.ĭecades after beginning as a botanical illustrator at the Smithsonian in 1972, Tangerini still draws dead plant specimens from all over the world, some over 200 years old. He told her that next time she should unfold the leaves. But exactly like that dead plant,” she says. “I drew a dead plant that looked like a dead plant. Hours later, he returned to see what Tangerini had done. Lyman set out a dried plant specimen, a piece of bristle board, a pencil, and a bottle of ink and with a pen. The next week Tangerini met Lyman at the museum for a test run. “He raised his eyebrows and said ‘I’ll just give you a try,’” she recalls now. The closest thing to a plant that Tangerini had drawn up to that point was the grass under the horses’ hooves. When she went to introduce herself to Smith for the first time, she brought along a high school art portfolio of horse and dog drawings. It was one of these neighbors who suggested that Tangerini talk to Lyman Smith, a botanist at the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium who happened to live in the neighborhood and to be looking to hire an illustrator. “I grew up in a neighborhood where even the neighbors knew I was the ‘girl who liked to draw.’” One summer in between college semesters at her junior college in Kensington, Maryland, Tangerini was looking for a summer job. “I’d always been interested in drawing, even from childhood,” recalls Tangerini. Her entrance into scientific illustration relied on a bit of luck (and a lot of skill), resembling more of a teacher and apprentice relationship rather than today’s formal college route. Though some universities now offer degrees in scientific illustration-like the University of Iowa’s Biological and Pre-medical Illustration program and the University of Chicago’s Medical Illustration program-no such program existed when Tangineri embarked on this field in the late 1960s. Wagner calls Tangerini “ irreplaceable” in the field of botanical illustration. Her artwork has appeared in books, peer-reviewed science journalsand museum exhibits. Over the course of her career, Tangerini has created hundreds of illustrations from over 1,000 different plant species from all over the world. Tangerini is the first and only botanical illustrator to work on staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where she has been putting her stamp on plant science for 46 years. Tangerini has adopted the tools and the vision of both the artist and scientist for her work, which is, as she describes it, “art in the service of science.” Next, she uses a microscope to investigate her specimen’s tiny hairs and veins, recreating their likeness in delicate lines with the pressure-sensitive pen of an architect or engineer drafter. Alice Tangerini’s botanical illustrations all begin the same way: with a seemingly simple line drawing, in which she explores a plant’s features-leaves, seed, stem, perhaps a flower or two.
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