Meet the Soil Scientists Using Dirt to Make Stunning Paintings

Soil samples collected throughout the western United States show the wide variety of minerals and colors belowground. (Karen Vaughan)

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Jan. 26, 2021, 8 a.m.

In September, as wildfire raged in Medicine Bow National Forest, Karen Vaughan watched smoke billow in a choked-off Wyoming sky. The sun was reduced to a matte neon-pink disc behind the haze, and Vaughan worried about her research site in the burning mountains. One of her graduate students still had one more day of fieldwork to complete, and the roads would soon be closed, if they weren’t already. Vaughan’s family—her husband and two kids—were outside too, watching as a light gray layer of wind-blown ash settled onto the landscape. The ash and vivid colors sparked something in Vaughan, who continually sought new inspiration for the paint she makes. She began dashing around, scraping the sediment from every flat surface and encouraging her kids to help collect the fine powder. She decided to incorporate that ash into watercolor pigments with hues reflecting the fire, indelibly preserving the moment. The small batch of paints, distributed to friends and local artists, would be used to create depictions of the destructive forces that allowed their creation in the first place. “You’re breathing that air, even in your house, and you look outside and see that weird orange glow,” says Vaughan. “You couldn’t help but be a part of that.”

A soil scientist and a professor at the University of Wyoming, Vaughan sees a lot more soils than the average person, and certainly knows them more intimately. Over many years spent examining them, she has come to appreciate their natural beauty and immense variability. Two years ago, she began channeling that appreciation into a product she could share with the world, turning the soils she loved into watercolor pigments. Now, she and her collaborator, Yamina Pressler, a soil scientist at California Polytechnic University, use soils to make pigments and paintings, bridging the gap between science and art. By sharing both their creative processes and scientific knowledge on social media and connecting with artists, scientists and the public, they aim to make soil education entertaining.

Click here to read the essay.

Art+Science at Harvard Forest

Harvard Forest, a part of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network since 1988, is part laboratory, part classroom. The museum is a cornerstone of its outreach, and communicating the story of the landscape through these incredible works of art fits with one of the site’s approaches: that many ways of knowing, including the humanities and fine arts, can integrate with the sciences to understand the past, present, and future of a place.

Art + Science at Harvard Forest, Massachusetts

Exploding the myth of the scientific vs. artistic mind.

Why you should stop taking pictures on your cell phone and learn to draw.

Science needs nonscientists.

Click the image to read this article posted in Slate.

Natural Histories: 400 Years of Scientific Illustration from the Museum’s Library (2013)

Featuring scientific illustrations spanning five centuries, the new exhibition “Natural Histories: 400 Years of Scientific Illustration from the Museum’s Library” explores the integral role illustration has played in scientific discovery through 50 striking, large-format reproductions from seminal holdings in the Museum Library’s Rare Book collection.

In this video, see a few of the works featured in the exhibition with comments from the exhibition’s curator Tom Baione, the Harold Boschenstein Director of Library Services, and from Melanie Stiassny, the Axelrod Research Curator in the Department of Ichthyology. The exhibition opens at the American Museum of Natural History on Saturday, October 19, 2013.

To learn more about the exhibition, visit http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/curre…. The presentation of Natural Histories at the American Museum of Natural History is made possible through the generosity of the Arthur Ross Foundation.

This video and all media incorporated herein (including text, images, and audio) are the property of the American Museum of Natural History or its licensors, all rights reserved. The Museum has made this video available for your personal, educational use. You may not use this video, or any part of it, for commercial purposes, nor may you reproduce, distribute, publish, prepare derivative works from, or publicly display it without the prior written consent of the Museum.

The Woman Who Made Science Beautiful

From The Atlantic, click on the image above to read the article.

Why I Traveled the World Hunting for Mutant Bugs

Click on the image above to read the article.

Scientists and Artists Must Work Together [Scientific American]

Bigger—and yes, more dramatic—action is necessary. So, I’m appealing to scientists and artists everywhere to connect. Scientists must invite artists to their next convening, and vice versa. Philanthropists and non-governmental organizations must increase their funding for cross-disciplinary projects. We have to find creative ways to combine facts with feelings. Only by working together can we give voice to the truly voiceless: the plants and animals, the bugs and birds, and the precious places that our imperiled wildlife calls home.

Read the article: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists-and-artists-must-work-together/

The woman who paints insects

This is an informative short article about Swiss artist-naturalist, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who is best known for her illustration of bugs, and their various mutations, living in the vicinity of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster zone and other areas surrounding nuclear power plants. A video interview is also included.

Beyond Nuclear International

Swiss artist, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, finds and draws bugs deformed by Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents and exposures

By Claus-Peter Lieckfeld

We speak of “dumb creatures” because animal utterances are largely incomprehensible to the human ear. But animals can show us things. And if you know how to look, they might even give you warning signals. Bugs, for example, give warnings where human perception fails. But to understand those warnings, you have to learn how to read their signals.

You can find the insect drawings of the Swiss artist and scientific illustrator, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, in museums and galleries all over the world. Most of them reflect (and praise) the breathtaking beauty of the insect realm. But their beauty can be deceptive.

In 1987, one year after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Hesse-Honegger came across deformed leaf bugs in areas of Sweden that had been hit hard by fallout from Ukraine. She sensed…

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