Painter, sculptress, author, illustrator, cake maker; this talented lady possesses many gifts.
Jo-Anne Mason, whose first art exhibition for ten years begins at Frank Costin’s Savannah Gallery in the Historic Old Valley on Saturday 23 February 2008, is looking forward to welcoming visitors and displaying her interest in Anguilla’s flora.
“I have always been fascinated by the tiny flowers that you can’t see unless you really look.

Jo-Anne Mason at work in her studio

They are gorgeous but they are tiny,” she says at her Island Harbour studio. The exhibits are all hand drawn using pencil and mixed media and represent some of the plant life on Anguilla. “I started with the idea that I would do the tiniest flowers and things evolved. These are plants and flowers commonly found on Anguilla but not necessarily indigenous ones. I believe that there is only one indigenous plant on Anguilla. These are the ones that for one reason or another have thrived here. They live if there is a drought, if there is rain, if there is a hurricane. They manage to survive so this is a series on the survivors and they are mostly what you would call weeds. That does not mean that they do not have a value, a lot of them are medically valuable and for herbal remedies and are food for creatures.
They are executed with precision and an eye for detail. “I intend using scanned images of these drawings as illustrations for a book on plant life on Anguilla.” Mason continues, “I feel that drawings work better for identification than photographs because if you photograph a plant in its natural habitat you have a lot of confusion because of those plants behind it and everything is green. You end up not seeing the plant that you are trying to identify. If you take a photograph of a plant on a white background it just ends up looking like a stick. It doesn’t really show a good example. If you draw a picture of it you eliminate all the background, all the noise and you get this clean concise drawing, often enlarged, of the plant or the flower and so when you are looking at them you can really identify what they look like, the shapes of the leaves, the flowers and the various stages of reproduction. “
“All the illustrations, which are done by hand on paper, are scanned into the computer and then I will compile them all, with information about the plants, into a book. I was told, by Mary Walker one of the people who did the book on the common plants of Anguilla, A Guide to Common Plants of Anguilla, that there are five hundred plants. I probably won’t do all five hundred plants because in some cases the plants are very similar,” she continues with a wry smile, “and that’s a lot of plants!”
“I would also like to do a section eventually on resort plants, plants that resorts bring in that are not Anguillian plants but they have been brought in and are surviving here without extra watering. There are beautiful new plants here now and I want to identify them. It will be a collection of plants that have always been on Anguilla and then a section of plants that have been brought to Anguilla which don’t require constant maintenance to survive. It will be a nice varied collection.”
The exhibition, which has been deliberately timed to coincide with the first day of the Anguilla Beautification Club’s Flower Show, opens with a reception between 3 and 5 pm. It will run continuously for some time to come. Mason is working on further exhibits and will use the proceeds of sales to finance her book. “I started work on this series in September 2007 and there are twenty five drawings completed so far,” she says. Looking at the image she is currently working on she says, “I would like to get this one done because it is the Cedar, the national flower, and that is what is on the poster [to advertise the exhibition]. That image is just young blossoms. This is the entire tree. This is the first one I have done where I have used the tree. The others I have done, I have just used a branch to identify leaves and flowers. I wanted to do some with the whole tree and then the flower and then the seeds.”

Clearly the exhibition will not be the last the island hears of ‘Anguilla Botanicals.’

| Printer-friendly page | Send this article to a friend |

World News