A rich tradition of picturing plants extends for nearly two millennia, and encompassing a wide range of practices and functions, subsuming decoration, transmission of scientific and horticultural information, and purely aesthetic ends. Cynthia Padilla's works are situated within this tradition. At least a cursory knowledge of the tradition enables siting Padilla's works within that tradition, and is essential to an understanding of why the works come to be as they are. Before turning to Padillas's works, a brief overview of the traditions of practices of using botanical materials in visual representations is therefore appropriate and useful.

Among the earliest picturing of plants occurs in medieval manuscripts, often with plant material assuming a subsidiary decorative function. Thus, for example, the borders of The Three Mary's at the Tomb of Christ in the Sacramentary, Harley MS 2908, ff. 53b-54 from the scriptorium of the Benedictine monastery of Seeon, Bavaria, c. 1020-1050 C.E. In this and the many similar instances, highly stylized leaves, ultimately derived from Acanthus spp. but passed from classical Corinthian capitals through innumerable copyists until conventionalized, form decorative borders of illuminations. By the quattrocento, conventional representation of plant forms is sometimes amended by direct observation. The decorative border of The House of Phristinus page, fol. 21v of Les Visions du chevalier Tondal, c. 1475 C.E., MS 30; 87.MN.141 in the Getty collection, with illuminations attributed to Simon Marmion, combines stylized but volumetric acanthus leaves (which form the initials of the patrons Charles the Bold and his consort Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, at the lower edge of the border) with violets, daisies and lilies that suggest some familiarity with living plant material.

Medieval herbals are closer in function and form of representation to later botanical illustration than the incidental use of botanical material in manuscript illumination. Medieval herbal manuscripts based on the extant works of classical authors, particularly the Greek Pedanios Dioscorides' De materia medica , circa 60 C.E., transmit the ancient texts until the invention of printing from movable type. Among the early important printings of Dioscorides is that of Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Petri Andreae Matthioli senesis medici: commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoriadis Anazabarbei De medica materia (Venice: Officina Valgrisiana, 1565), illustrated with woodcuts by Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck. Not all early printed herbals have illustrations of the quality of Mattioli's work: through much of this period, illustrations in herbals was based not on direct observation of plant material, but continues-as with medieval manuscript illuminations-to be based on earlier illustrations. Thus Ortus Sanitatis; de herbis et plantis (Strasbourg: Reinhard Beck, 1517), is illustrated with crude woodcuts from a 1485 Herbarius and repeats the errors of its predecessor, including the representation of a narcissus with human heads for flowers.

Exploration and colonization resulted in the discovery of a plenitude of botanical material previously unknown in Europe, material of substantial interest to science and medicine, commerce, and horticulture. Botanical illustrations of this material were instrumental in disseminating information of these newly discovered species. Thus Etienne Pierre Ventenat's Description des plantes nouvelles et peu connues, cultivees dans le jardin de J. M. Cels (Paris: De l'impre. de Crapelet, 1800), illustrates botanical materials obtained and grown by Jacques-Martin Cels from naturalist-explorers, with copper engravings done by Pierre Joseph Redouté, regarded by many as the greatest of botanical illustrators. Indeed, Redouté's Les Roses (Paris: C. L. F. Panckoucke, 1824) is a masterwork of the genre, with illustrations using the copperplate stipple engraving method of his invention enabling the printing of several colors from the same plate, achieving a subtlety of hue and value nearly equal to that of his paintings of botanical materials.

Concurrently with the influx of newly discovered plants into Europe, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus' systematic botanical taxonomy utilized the structure of the reproductive parts of flowers to establish genus, while the remaining morphology of the plant is used to determine species. Linnaeus' 1753 Species plantarum had a profound impact on the conventions of botanical illustration, in that the significance of flower structure for taxonomy resulted in greater emphasis on precise observation and description of the flower, with stamen and pistil distinctly delineated, while pre-Linnaean botanical illustration tended to give greater attention to the plant as a whole, in which the flower, along with seed, stem, roots and leaves were all shown.

Apart from botanical illustration itself, plant material is a central motif in much still life painting. Flower painting was established as a category of the Dutch still life tradition by the last half of the sixteenth century, concurrent with the widespread Dutch interest in gardening and horticulture. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621) is particularly distinguished among an accomplished sequence of Dutch flower painters. His A Bouquet in an Arched Window (The Hague: Maritshuis, c. 1620) is exemplative: the essentially symmetrical arrangement of flowers in the vase reiterates the symmetry of the arched window, on the sill of which the vase rests. Each petal receives equal attention under an even light. Working the in the manner typical of the time, Bosschaert assembled his paintings from studies rather than working directly from live botanical material during the facture of the final work-something evident from the juxtaposition of blooms from plants of different blooming periods together in one work. Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) was one of the few women among Dutch painters; daughter of the distinguished botanist Frederick Ruysch, she was a student of Willem van Aelst, and had a long, distinguished career, notwithstanding bearing ten children along the way. Jan van Huysum (1682-1749) was the son of Justus van Huysum the Elder, also a flower painter. Van Huysum was insistent on working from nature, though he was also very active as a draughtsman; his extant drawing, exhibiting a broad spontaneity refined out of his paintings, include both preliminary studies for his paintings and finished works. The strong chiaroscuro, and open form of Van Huysum's Bouquet of Flowers (1726, London, Wallace Collection) is consonant with Late baroque painting generally, and the delight in detail continues that of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder a century before but does not diminish the liveliness of the composition. In eighteenth century Spain, Luis Melandez' paintings are notable for their lush, intense color and dramatic lighting: his Apples, Pomegranates, and Grapes in a Landscape (1771, Museo del Prado, Madrid) thrusts the strongly cross lit fruit forward from a partially shadowed middle distance landscape with a cloudy sky in the background. Far from being a botanical illustration, the painting is a exploration of the manifesting effects of light and dark in paint across a variety of surfaces. Similarly, Van Gogh's paintings of plant material such as the 1886 Flowers in a Violet Vase have affinities with these earlier works, but are concerned much more with the paintness of paint, an occasion for the facture of paintings about painting, in which the motif is a pretext than in conveying botanical information about the motifs; thus also Monet's late paintings of water lilies. Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of flowers are indicative of the use of the botanical motif as a basis for expressive form, quite apart from any utility of the representation. This formalist and expressionist turn obtains even when some reference to the mode of presentation prevailing in earlier printed botanical illustrations obtains, as in the collaborations of distinguished artists in botanical livre d' artiste, as exemplified in Leonard Baskin's woodcut illustrations for the poetry of Anthony Hecht in The Gehenna Florilegium (Rockport: Gehenna Press, 1998), and Donald Sultan's work with the poet Robert Creeley.

In Padilla's works, salient detail is selected while nonessential aspects are omitted, an analytical process suggested by the presentation of dried plant materials, photographs, preliminary drawings and notes along with the finished rendering. Comparing the photographs-widely presumed to be the 'transparent' medium par excellence-of the source material with the finished rendering is particularly informative of the importance of selecting and emphasis, dependent in turn on careful and sustained close observation of form and structure. The several significant aspects of the plant are rendered individually, as in Iris, Rosa: in the upper register, the flower alone is depicted, while details form a predella-like register below. The botanical source material is rendered with the assumption of a neutral light source, producing the minimum chiaroscuro necessary for the description of volume and texture. Marking of the surface-the signifier at its elemental level-is effacing, with the image built up through a controlled, deliberate, methodical application of the instrument.

One is thus persuaded that in looking at the representation one sees the thing itself, things as they are, rather than the means of representation. What one sees is the summation in visual form of sustained close and precise looking, the translation of the duration of observation and rendering into the simultaneity of presentation, of presentness, in a manner that casual looking would not disclose. That is not a small thing.

Cynthia Padilla received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include A Passion for Flowers, an Eye for Detail, Mildred Hawn Gallery, Southern Methodist University, 2001, where she teaches continuing education classes in botanical illustration. Her career incluses work executing floral designs for the textile manufacturing industry.