Art, Design, and Biology

Figure 1, Joseph Noel Paton - Study from Nature, Inveruglas - B2008.20 - Yale Center for British Art

Introduction

Look closely at the painting above by the landscape above by the Scottish painter Joseph Noel Paton. Do you spy a pair of binoculars in the lower in right foreground on top of a rocky bed of moss along the stream? So much focus in this artwork is given to the lively details of the landscape that you may have missed the figure of a man in the midground of the painting, do you see him now too looking as well within the painting? Nineteenth-century thinkers like Charles Darwin and Anna Atkins began empirical scientific study through observation and direct experience. Darwin observed “vivid green lightness of the foliage…of a tree fern in Rio de Janiero…“emerald green” spots of a Patagonian lizard and a alive with flecks of “green sparks,” in The Origin of Species.¹ Out of the full color spectrum humans evolved to see shades of the color green the best. Atkins, a botanist and the daughter of a scientist collected specimens and from them developed several albums of drawings of the natural world with particular interest to shell drawings and cyanotypes of ferns.² Yet today few people can identify plants by name without the assistance of technology.³ In the foreground, Paton carefully show us rocks covered with moss.

This Curriculum Unit is concerned with moss, an organism that is easily overlooked but for one whose form and life cycle are deeply fascinating. Students will respond with artworks and demonstrate understanding through reading and writing about mosses and speaking when presenting their artworks. They will use the skills of observation, planning and reflection in commonplace books. Commonplace books were created as repositories of information about any subject often with text accompanied by illustrations such as botanical drawings.⁴ They were widely used during the Enlightenment, the period at the end of the eighteenth century when philosophers and scientists promoted the idea of rational thought over accepted belief, and placed emphasis on experimental proof rather than religious faith.

In this Unit, students will learn the difference between aquatic and terrestrial mosses and names of three common mosses in New Haven. Students will also dissect mosses and create drawings with watercolors from their observations in artist commonplace books. There are wonderful examples of artworks with the elements or line and color that students can see enlarged on a smartboard or printed on handouts with artist information from the book by Of lichen & moss by Van Houten, Kate, Erica Van Horn, and Colin Sackett.⁵

Students will also be introduced to the photographic process with the creation of cyanotypes from their dissected mosses and will take polaroid photos of mosses on a field trip that they will use in their artist commonplace book compositions. Inspiration for drawings of mosses will be drawn from artists such as John Ruskin who paid close attention to leaves and other natural forms and works by his followers such as Joseph Noel Paton, who created Study from Nature. Students will also draw moss in a graphic style inspired by selected drawings from first edition of the comic the Swamp Thing by the British author Alan Moore who also created the popular comic The Watchmen. Students can choose to create figures covered in moss textures and/or illuminate letters with moss drawings using pencil, watercolor and markers.  I plan to use as an example the image of The Swamp Thing half submerged in water in a swamp environment with roses blooming from his hands and covered in shades of textured green moss.⁶