Montier Photo Festival

Presentation

Montier Photo Festival

Annie PATTERSON & Frédéric DEPALLE

  France
  Annie PATTERSON began botanical painting in 2002 after a long career as a designer for a very diverse range of clients. She has always had a fascination for growing and collecting unusual plants, so combined with her drawing and painting skills and a good eye for detail and colour, botanical painting was the perfect combination. Annie's fine art botanical paintings are watercolours on vellum and on paper. Her paintings are held in the Highgrove Florilegium, the Hampton Court Palace Florilegium, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburg USA and many private collections. Frédéric DEPALLE Amateur photographer, passionate about botany since childhood : "It is to immortalize the splendours of the plant kingdom (often ignored) that I began photography. A new passion is thus born, one leading the other, which leads me to travel to discover and photograph constantly little known plant species, more particularly in the Mediterranean area and in the Middle East. My photographic approach aims to restore the plant in its natural biotope, without artifice.

Exposition

 

The exhibition we propose to you constitutes in a pooling of our passions for plants, and more particularly here for the Irises of the section Oncocyclus, of which some species are among the rarest plants in the world, with geographical distributions of only a few thousand square meters. These irises grow in the Caucasus and in the Middle East, hence their common name of Irises of the rising sun. We have been working with Annie for 3 years on this project combining watercolours and photos and we have chosen to exhibit 15 species (8 are presented in this project), each ones is illustrated by a botanic watercolour, an in-situ photo on site and a flower  taken in a studio photo ; these choices to appreciate different approaches of the plant and to approach part of the work of the botanists.