Exhibitions

IRINA NEACȘU: BOTANICAL JOURNEYS

Reece Museum (ETSU) / 363 Stout Dr., Johnson City , TN May 13 - August 23rd

Irina Neacșu

Irina Neacsu is a designer and a botanical artist, member of the American Society of Botanical Artists and founder of the Romanian Society of Botanical Artists. Her projects have covered a wide range of creative fields, from painting and graphics to art teaching, applied arts and interior design.

Later on, in the field of painting and graphics, Neacsu refocused from the architectural study that laid the foundations of her professional training to botanical art, where she cultivated her fascination for plants. The naturalistic perspective and the intense, participatory observation led Neacsu’s activity to various approaches such as the classic botanical illustration, ink drawing, or abstract and surrealistic oil painting.

Neacsu’s botanical works strive to highlight the ephemeral beauty of flowers and their mortality as an integrated and integrating vision of life.

Botanical Journeys articulates a dialogue between two mountainous ranges that presently experience a common faith in the questioning of their post coal mining identity: The Appalachian Mountains in the United States and The Carpathian Mountains in Romania.

“With academic training in architecture, approaching botanical art is an attempt to continue investigating cultural landscapes from a natural perspective of the reciprocal influence and fragile relation between culture and nature. In my botanical artwork, my interest falls into wild flora and its cultural characteristics, as well as on other types of interaction between culture and nature, such as fungi attacking historical buildings, or secular trees shaping cultural landscapes. Meanwhile, my research focuses on Romanticism, natural subjects in European Protestant Art, and Botanical Art,” says the artist.