In full flower
AT 95, DICK RAUH REMAINS A MASTER OF BOTANICAL ART
Dick Rauh pushes himself up from a chair in his Westport studio, eager to share yet another example of his latest work.
“Look at this. This is the flower of an oak tree. What I love about this is the leaves were so new that some had downy hair on them. And others were this brilliant white green. And all this stuff down here is the male flowers,” he says, sounding amazed at each element he points to.
His water color painting of the oak fragment is larger than life. He’s made the flowering twig about three feet long. It slants upward, but the delicate female leaves droop down from its tip, while the male flowers are suspended below, like silvery jingle-bells.
Rauh is a 95-year-old master botanical artist and teacher with seemingly undiminished skills and enthusiasm. He’s already shown off a pen and ink drawing of desiccated wasp nest, its frayed contours so finely rendered it seems a bas relief clone of the original.
“An insect! An insect,” he exclaims, “creates this beauty by building up these layers and layers of paper, way before the Chinese ever thought of doing it.”
He says the wasp nest was brought to him by his daughter-in-law, one of the people who act like “agents,” finding specimens for him to draw or paint. “They see something unusual and they think, “Oh, Dick would love to do that,’ ” he says.
From somewhere in the studio clutter, he retrieves a notecard signed by an agent named Lynn who has enclosed a sassafras leaf so withered it’s as translucent as a dragonfly wing and about has small. Using a microscope camera, he has photographed the leaf and transferred it into a comput
er for study. He’s zoomed in on different sections of the leaf, producing a gallery of images that could pass for abstract paintings. Or more likely, from Rauh’s point of view, plant tissue biopsies.
One of the things that distinguishes Rauh from other botanical artists, other than his age and gender (few are males), is that he has a doctorate in plant sciences, earned in 2001. For years, he’s taught the required plant morphology course in the New York Botanical Garden’s botanic art certificate program.
“I’m a pedant,” he says, making a joking apology for his digression on the veination in monocot and dicot leaves. “I love the detail. It’s an affirmation because when I really look closely at things going on in nature I’m amazed. Everybody would pass by most of the stuff I paint. I see such symmetry, such order, such logic. I’ve kind of become a proselytizer for these little thing of nature.”
One of the people who took Rauh’s course is Jeanne Reiner, a Greenwich artist who is a co-founder of the Tri-State Botanic Artists of NYBG and who has gotten to know Rauh as a friend driving him to its meetings.
“He’s that interesting mix of somebody using both sides of the brain. He’s got the knowledge, but he also paints like a maniac. He does these huge paintings which knock people out,” Reiner says. “He can illustrate in such a way that he can make the novice viewer understand what plant parts are for … He’s not just doing it for the beauty of the piece. He doesn’t let the beauty of the piece take over.”
Reiner says working on a larger scale may be a factor of his age, but adds Rauh always tended to work large and shows no signs of slowing down.
“We don’t know what he’s made of,” Reiner says, speaking for herself and other artists. “He’s constantly working. He seems like he’s driven by something. Even at his age he looks for shows. He has no problem submitting his work.”
In fact, Rauh says he had just sent off a painting of a celery root he hopes will be in an heirloom plant show next year at the Botanic Garden. He was also preparing for large exhibit at The Westport Library, originally slated for August.
“See what I’ve got to do for this damn show,” he says, gesturing to stack of paintings that need framing. “I forgot to tell you I’m about to publish a book,” he says. It is a text based on his years of teaching plant morphology. “I don’t expect to go on forever,” he says.
Maybe so, but Rauh still teaches classes in flower drawing at senior centers in Westport and Wilton and at the Lifetime Learners Institute at Norwalk Community College. During the COVID-19 shutdown, he kept up a full schedule teaching remotely by Zoom. He says he’ll freeze the flowering oak twig he painted to use in class once he resumes teaching in person.
He no longer drives himself and admits to being hard of hearing. But, he says, “When it comes down to drawing ability, I can hold my own, thank God. And see on my own.”
Rauh doesn’t maintain a personal artist’s website. He is a past president of both the American Society of Botanical Artists and the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. (His work can been seen on science-art.com.) He grew up in Brooklyn and attended what is now the LaGuardia High School for Music and Art and the Performing Arts.
He says he has always loved drawing and kept sketchbooks, but didn’t make much use of his skills in a long career doing special effects for television commercials and movies. For years he ran his own company, commuting to Manhattan. Nearing retirement, he started taking gardening classes at the Botanical Garden, then completed its new certificate program. He began teaching there in 1994 and has been named Teacher of the Year.
Asked about awards for his art, Rauh waves his hand dismissively. “Sure, I’ve got awards. But hell, they don’t mean anything,” he says.
Rauh’s work is in several important botanical collections in England and the U.S. His most prestigious award came in 2006 at age 81, when his series of nine watercolors won the Gold Medal and Best in Show at the Royal Horticultural Society Flower Show in London. The paintings flowed from pen and ink illustrations he had done for a guide book to winter wildflowers.
“When I started drawing those damn things, I got so into them I had to paint them,” he says. “Again, because of my shortcomings, I wanted to show the detail. I painted them full size.”