• Hunt Library, 4th Floor
• Saturday, October 5 - Tuesday, December 17

Iterant Flora is a collection of botanical portrayals by the artist and illustrator Lisa Rasmussen, a 1984 graduate of the College of Fine Arts. Rasmussen, based in Pittsburgh, USA, was commissioned to create drawings of plants seen in the paintings and lithographs of Raja Ravi Varma (1848- 1906), the celebrated Indian artist.

Done in the traditional style of botanical illustrations, each of Rasmussen’s plants corresponds to a specific Varma painting or lithograph. Every plant is drawn in the same way that it is encountered in Varma’s work, and at similar angles. Rasmussen’s drawings are intended to evoke the principle of repetition and pattern recognition, in order to assist the viewer to identify the same plant in Varma’s work.

Iterant Flora is part of “Encounters with the Botanical,” a collaborative venture between the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, Bangalore and Pedagogy with the Botanical, a project started by Geetanjali Sachdev (GSIA 1992), through her doctoral work at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. 

The works in this exhibit are gicleè prints of the original pen & ink drawings which are now at the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation in Bangalore and set for an exhibition there sometime in the near future.