Chris Graebner
When I was young, my mother tried hard to interest me in plants, pointing them out and telling me their names. I really wasn’t interested. But I was interested in painting. And I continued to paint until I got married, when the combination of oil paints, turpentine fumes and small apartments made painting difficult, and I turned to other types of creative endeavors. We moved to Hillsborough in 1990, and I saw a listing for a botanical art class at the NC Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill. I had done a few botanical subjects in stained glass and in needlework, and I thought the class would be a way back into painting. Little did I guess where that would lead! While taking the classes, I purchased a dissecting microscope to understand the plant structures better. I’ve always enjoyed working with microscopes – I ran biomedical research labs in the 70s and 80s – and observing flowers up close really kindled my interest in them.
When UNC developed a certificate program in botanical illustration, I signed up right away and was in the first group to go through the program. It’s a wonderful program and takes students through all the traditional mediums for botanical art: graphite, ink, watercolor, and colored pencil as well as composition, color theory and other standard art courses. But when I completed the certificate, I went back to the medium I love most, oil paint.
I like to paint much larger than life, so that the viewer will be able to see flowers the same way I see them – as individuals. Like snowflakes, each one is different, even on the same plant.
