 So thrilled to see so many people here to support the arts and to support Susan. I am particularly thrilled that we are showing Susan's work here and the circle has truly come full round. Susan worked here for many years, not in this new part of the building, but in the farmhouse, when we were back in North Branch, this part of Bins. Susan lives in South Woodbury and she works for another Bins offspring, the Four Winds Nature Institute, which is how I first met Susan. And many of you know that she has a long career in art. She holds a BA in printmaking and botany from the new college in Sarasota, Florida. An MFA from Vermont College and a diploma in botanical art from the Society of Botanical Artists in London. But I want to tell you why she is one of my favorite teachers. Maybe some of you have studied with her and now some of us have stories, I'd love to hear them. Susan's going to give a few remarks and then we'll return to socializing and enjoying the work. And like I said, if you have any stories, this is an I'd love to hear them. One of, I feel like Susan's particular skill is in marrying the science and the art. So she does that in her representations of what she studies and she also does that in the teaching. When my child started kindergarten five years ago, I immediately signed up to be a four-wins volunteer teacher in his classroom because I had heard that it was a great way to, you know, get in your child's classroom and build the hours that, for them, for me, I have been at home with my son for his early childhood. I had these incredibly long days yawning in front of me from 8.30 to three. So it gave me a chance to get into the classroom and see what public school teaching was all about, which I had really not experienced since I had been a student myself. And it was all that, four-wins was all that, but what I hadn't realized was how much I myself would learn. And so basically every month, Susan works with parent volunteers all around Vermont. I live in Montpelier, so we were at Union. But she takes this melange of adults who do or do not have time to do this in their workweek, but are figuring out how. And most of them have absolutely no natural history background. And she gives these fabulous, rich trainings that are basically detailed climbers on everything from leaf miners to the science of snowflakes and all of these tons of fun activities to do with the students. So you turn around after you've spent a morning with Susan learning it in the next month, you turn around and teach to your child and 21 other children. So clearly her skill as an artist, she was able to marry with her skill as a teacher. So you can see for yourself that she, her close observations of nature, puzzling out what she sees and be able to translate it into two dimensions is a passion. And yeah, I just wanted to share that her artistic skills are evenly matched by her ability to gather people of any age and teach to them what she sees and find to their process. So with that, I'll just put in a little plot. I highly recommend if you too would like this opportunity to learn who's, she's teaching two classes, two weekend day classes. Coming up in the fall, you're an earthquake, Nature Journaling is in September. I think that was on this Sunday. One of them's on a Saturday, one of them's on a Sunday. Three Sundays. Oh, okay. So I have Nature Journaling and Nature Illustration and you can go to NorthFrenchNatureCenter.org to learn all the details. You can hit it right here. And you can hit it right there. And I really encourage you to do that. And yeah, without any further ado, I will turn it over to Susan. Thank you. And I'd like to thank the Nature Center for inviting me to show here because this beautiful new building is a place for art. And I don't show very much. I draw a lot and I don't show a lot. I draw things that get published more than I can take. All right, and I draw and paint things that get good. Flat files. You see, just know a lot of her. I'll try. Try. Oh. So, making pictures is a way of communicating without talking. Some of us prefer to speak in languages that don't require talking. So here I am talking about making pictures. It's a little weird, but I won't talk for very long. But there's some things I wanted to tell you. In this work, because I really like plants, love plants, we're working at them forever. Since I was a very small child, I've been looking at plants very closely. My great Aunt Frances, who was a naturalist, used to show up in the summer time. And at the time when I was sure that I was going to grow up to be a mammologist so that I could hug furry things, I think that's what I thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to grow up to be a mammologist. Aunt Frances said, well, you know, you might not see them very often. They're out at night. And the plants are here all the time. And she was right. The plants are there all the time. You can go see them. They're, they have roots. They don't go anywhere. They don't run around. They don't fly away. They don't look at you with eyes. They don't make a lot of noise except when the wind's coming up and the wind hits the ridge and then they're noisy. But mostly they're very quiet. So I think people don't think about them as much as I wish they did. I think they're, I think they're some of the most interesting things on earth and they're everywhere. Sometimes, I don't know why I have this recurring thought. I'm driving down the road and I think, how many leaves am I flinging out? It's a big number. Can we get Dave in here? Is he coming? There's a chair up here for you. He's gonna sit up in there. I don't, I don't know if we could use that door. We could do whichever's easier that door this way. Okay, that's my husband. So I try to make pictures. I try to make pictures I haven't seen before. There's a lot of art. There's a lot of pictures of plants out there. And you might look around here and think, oh, she hates flowers. But they don't hate flowers. I actually love flowers. I just have not chosen to give them, they get all the attention already. So I've chosen not to make very many pictures of flowers but instead they're pictures of a lot of woody plants and small parts of them and up close, because up close is really interesting. Where there are pictures of trees out in the lobby and in here, there's the pictures of the, there's a rock at Tumbridge School up to the edge of the playground. Some of you have seen it. It's kind of up the hill that it's at the base of one of those round Tumbridge Hills. And it's right at the edge where it turns to woods. And there's basswood and ash growing together. And actually so close to each other that it's hard to tell it's not kind of all one tree. And the bark is similar enough that you have to kind of stand there and then look at the leaves and go, oh, right, that's the ash, that's the basswood. And the little children play under that rock in those trees every day. And so when you go up, they've worn all the dirt from around the roots and there's little dinosaurs. Little trucks, the roots have some real net place. So when I do that, it's about the place that I'm in. It's about the big fallen down maple there. When I drew it, I've been fallen for 30 years. And with its roots still in the creek, it's a Jerry's house. And is it still alive, Jerry? No. It's there. It's there. So it was still alive. And some of the side branches had become part of the canopy. They were trying to be trees on their own right, but with a very small one. I don't know, it wasn't. So I didn't think it would last too much longer. So place is really important. And it's a pattern. So a lot of the time when you look at something, okay, what is interesting about this picture? And it's often that there was some kind of repeating and varied pattern. And I think that's something that I see here. It's nice to see it out. I'm not sure I knew that, but that's how it was to be. So most of these images, in fact, all of them really, except for one, are what you could call botanical art. And that's art that depicts a plant with as much accuracy as possible. But it's done for the picture except, it's done for the sake of making a picture to look at. The one piece in here I would say is a botanical illustration is the ink drawing of the Indian plant over there. What a fun plant. I was just trying to figure it out. It's this ghost thing. And when somebody tells you it's a flower, it's a flower. But it's a really interesting flower with a relationship with fungus and with fig root. And so it has the oddest clump of roots that no bigger than that if you pull it up. And when you cut and look in the cells, I don't know what I'm looking at really when I splice those cells and looked inside them. But it looks like, I'm speculating here, that the fungus is inside the cells from the root. And I'm sure somebody can correct me. I'll borrow something though, because. But when I was looking, I was opening the seed pod and dust came out. Here's Dave, come on in if you want to. So I thought there were no seeds. I thought, oh well, this one didn't make seeds. Jerry said, look again. So I looked again and I put them under the microscope and they're like, this is where I need color. They're like a little butterscotch wrapped in cell honey. They're fancy, they're so small, but they're beautiful and sparkly. And that's all the baking site needs for seeds. That was remarkable. So sometimes here I'm discovering things while I'm drawing and I think that's true. Because you draw in order to see. There's many things you don't see until you sit down and draw it. So about drawing. It's simple, but it's hard. But it's simple. So pencil, paper, that's all you need. I like that about drawing. That you don't need anything expensive to do it. You can do it wherever you are, whenever. And it's one reason to keep doing that. You can carry a sketchbook anywhere. And I draw so that I can see things. And when you look at a drawing, because there's a chair for you here. When you draw and when you look at somebody's drawing, this is another reason why I love drawing. You can see somebody's brain working and what their hand does. It's so immediate. When the painting happens, there's all this stuff that happens. There's planning, there's a drawing first and it's very complete. And then you trace it and you transfer the drawing to the paper and erase almost all of it. But you've got your original drawing for reference and then you have the photographs you took because everything wilts and then you paint it. And that's a painting that's got this long, all those steps, but a drawing is just there. It's just immediate. And I love looking at them. It's like looking at somebody's hand writing. Only better. And you can see what, you can look at what, what was that person paying attention to? Why was that worth drawing? I recommend it. The mediums here are primarily just graphite pencil on paper. But they're hard pencils. So I use often times a two-h pencil which is relatively hard sharpened. And I use a very sharp pencil because you can get detail and keep it when you're using a pencil and erase it, which is really great. At Silver Point, you can't erase. And there's a couple of Silver Points here and I do more of them, but they're not in the showers. They have their own problems. But I'm gonna hand around a few of them so you can look at what they're like. Silver Point is drawing with a piece of silver. And the way we do it now is we get a biopiece of soft silver wire and put it in a mechanical pencil holder. It's very, you know, and draw with it. But you can't draw on paper with it because you would just make a hole in the paper. So you have to prepare the paper or the piece of wood with a crown that has enough mineral in it that it'll scratch, the silver will scratch off on it. Just enough abrasion so that you can get a line with the silver. You can also draw with gold. And I have a gold point back there where you can try it out. But it's interesting, you know how we use a streak plate? Two of my colleagues are here. So we use a streak plate to test a rock to see what it would be because you can take a gray stone and the streak may be rusty-colored. The streak of silver is silver, but it tarnishes. That's the great thing about it. It gets that warm, dark color eventually. After time and people breathing and stuff. It's sulfur that turns it, it's sulfur that turns it. That color, you can't erase it with, well, with great difficulty and it rests the surface. And it doesn't get very dark, but it has a quality that I think is not like anything else. And then it has this problem, which is when you put glass on it, it doesn't look much different from a pencil drawing and it's very difficult to photograph. But I'm gonna pass a few of these around. These are from another project and these are done on panels of a basswood, which Dave made for me. He cut them and cleaned them by hand. And I jessoed them with real jesso which is a mix of rat skin glue, cooked up and powdered, basically powdered marble, some stuff called whiting. And there's six coats and it's wet sanded in between. It's nice, it's a very nice surface. This odd object that's coming around are the bones of the snapping turtle in the back of the shell. And you fell lost to touch the surface. I would prefer it than to touch the surface. Well, no, I'm gonna do it again and ruin that. It's okay. I want you to see it. I want you to see it, because it's pretty cool. In other words, this is the other side of the same two bones. This bones in the back of the turtle shell. So that you can see the scoots, right? And they're made of tortoise shell, right? It's like fingernails, but when the turtle is dead and decaying, and I got in trouble with my family because I was dead and decaying in August, got stuck in the house. I heard about it, I was gone. Anyway, so when the scoots, the outer tortoise shell part comes off, then the bones are underneath and their joints are in completely different places. And the bones have these long projections on them and they're knit together. And this is silver. That's silver point, and that's that warm, brownish color that you can't get with anything else. And then this one isn't quite so delicate than you might think, but it's just... The bones in the turtle, the bones in the turtle. This one is, that one is... Under the skirt. Well, long story about that. I can't tell all the stories. And that's a microscopic view of slant cells, so that's where you start with that one. So that's silver point. And I set it up back there so that you can try it out. So silver point. And then there's penning. And penning is easily reproducible, very visible. And you're fine because it's ink, you know? You got the white paper and then suddenly you put the ink on it and you can't do anything about it. It's just in the wrong place. Well, there's the... And thank goodness for photos often, this whole security service. And there's watercolors here. And watercolors, the silver color that I deserve is its reputation for being difficult. It doesn't deserve its reputation for being out of control unless that's how you paint. But this kind of painting is not loose. Versus, you know, it's not very zuberant either. So it means, you know, there's a lot to say. One little thing on another. But I really like working in watercolors. I can't say, I haven't not been doing it for very long. I've really only been painting with watercolors for maybe 20 years. Any of this under a magnified black? I wear this thing on my cat. Now, I could, when I was younger, I could see perfectly well, very close up. And I can't now, and I borrowed this magnifier that he used for doing all railroad work. And when? Oh! It fits over your glasses and you can flip it up. The one I have is called a magnifocuser. And you can look at the specimen and you're drawing at the same time. It's a great thing for us getting older. So, did I say plants are important? I hope that when you look at these, it makes you want to go make friends with a plant. Because they're out there. They're such good, such good characters. Yes. And we need to take care of, you know, as much as we can, it would be nice if we could avoid cutting them. That's really what I'm hoping for. It's what I'm looking for. I would like to meet as many plants as I can. And I'd like them to still keep on living. Because they're important in ways that are just innumerable in the ways that they, not to mention that they're just alive and things are good when they're alive. But their interconnections with the rest of their ecosystems is something that's pretty much beyond us. We just get little glimpses. Oh, this heats that! Look at that. And their structures are also really good. So thank you. Thanks for coming. And I'll take questions. But if anybody wants to just get up and look at our tips, that's fine too. Oh, yeah, I was going to pass that around because it arrived and isn't up in the show yet. And it isn't like anything else here because it's so bright. It's a walk. It's a pocket painting. It's walked around in the fall in a year when the cedars had combs. And they do this year too, again. And so everything was shedding seeds all over. The ground was covered with seeds and needles and bits of things. And ash seeds, black ash and white ash are in here. Several kinds of maple. And it just had a pocket. And I put everything in it. And I brought it home. It's a pot, I know. What came home in my walk? It was just two mornings because it was really fun. So I brought in all the objects and put a square of canvas and I drew a grid on it and I drew a very light grid on a piece of paper. And I just did one thing after another and kept putting them back. Arranged it the way I wanted it. That's how that happened. So that's that. And the other works. And sell the picture of the woman that sells. How did you get the color right now? It looked like it had color. It looked like it had green and maybe I had an imagination. Yeah, the room is green. Yeah. It's just that way around. It's a color. You've liked it. You talked about silver paint. The gold, what will happen when you draw it? Oh, nothing. It's platinum gray. It's lighter than silver. It does not turn. Gold is gold. Yeah, but it's not gold. It's silver gray. Yeah, like platinum would be about the same. But harder. Gold on a streak plate is black. But it doesn't do that for the gold. It's just not gritty enough. Yeah. When you're using a wire of gold or silver in a mechanical pencil, how do you keep the, especially the silver, how do you keep the tip sharp? Silver. So do you do the silver point just because it's something different or is there an advantage? It sounds more like a disadvantage. It's really nerdy. I don't know. It's just, I like doing it. Especially on a ground that's as smooth as those panels I cast around. It has a feel to it. That's just different than rubbing off graphite. It just, it just has a good feel to it. And I like the way it looks. And it's, you know, and there are silver points, artists out there. So both botanical art and silver point are both in the middle of a big renaissance at the moment. Well, silver point is a little small renaissance. And botanical art, there's a lot of it. There's a lot of people practicing botanical art right now that didn't used to be. Silver point and metal point can be so different from anything else depending on the music. I feel like a beginner with it still, but it's just, it's nice to do. And I like that challenge of not being able to erase. I think carrying those lines be as fine as they can. Thanks. Thanks for coming. Appreciate it.