SHE CAPTURED THE SOUL OF ANTS
Scientific illustrator later became painter and photographer
When two Harvard biologists were writing a book on ants, they needed pictures that showed more than the correct anatomy. They wanted readers to see how these social insects behave.
Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson turned to Holldobler’s ex-wife, Turid, an artist and photographer who, her former husband says, painted “the soul of ants.”
The resulting book, simply called The Ants, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Turid Holldobler-Forsyth (she later married a second time) moved on to have a career in the Rideau Lakes as an artist and photographer specializing in nature and gardens. Born in Germany, she spent her much of life in Canada, the United States and Costa Rica.
She died on April 27 of cancer in Kingston. She was 74.
Her watercolours of plants landed her a job as a scientific illustrator when she was a teenager studying art at the University of Wurzburg, around 1957. That’s where she met Bert Holldobler, who was studying insects and who also painted.
“She had a talent for catching — very fast, with a few lines — insect behaviour,” he recalls. The pair had more in common than a love of insects, and married in 1965. They moved to the University of Frank- furt, and Turid did bee illustrations there for Karl von Frisch, who later won a Nobel Prize for decoding the “dance” through which bees communicate.
The Holldoblers eventually moved to Boston after Bert was invited to spend two years at Harvard. This turned into two decades of teaching and research there.
At Harvard, Bert and E.O. Wilson collaborated on The Ants (1990).
“She never used photographs, and this is important,” Bert said. “She was an able close-up photographer, but she observed these ants under the microscope and made sketches. She made sketches of their movements and behaviours.” Then she painted, because it was the only sure way to freeze the ants in the exact social interaction she wanted to capture. He compares it to drawing an athlete and capturing the feeling of motion.
“You have to get the sense that these animals live. They really do something,” he said.
“Ants are amazing because they do things together. They talk together. And Turid is an acute observer who sees with her eyes and it flows into her hand and she puts it on paper. This is the best way I can explain it,” he said.
“If you see these little creatures under the microscope, you see what an unbelievable beauty they are. It’s easy to see ( beauty) with butterflies. It’s gorgeous. But Turid would take a butterfly and just use a piece of the wing and make an abstract painting out of it.”
The couple eventually divorced — Bert says they “drifted apart” with divergent careers in Boston — and Turid married Canadian Adrian Forsyth, who became a prominent conservationist.
The couple lived briefly in Arizona and then moved to a rural home near Lake Opinicon in 1980. They lived there together for 10 years but later divorced, and she had lived alone there since 1990.
“She described to us how, if you got one tiny hair on the leg wrong or had one too many, the biologist would just jump on you,” said Ann Lukits, a neighbour and friend at Opinicon.
“She always described herself as a visual person. Even in the hospital she regarded the world through a different lens.
“She liked insects. She’s the only person I know who opened her doors and windows in the summer and let the bugs come in ... She regarded them as part of her world.”
“What she takes (as subject matter) is always nature,” Bert said. “She takes small patterns in stones, she takes a piece of a plant, and uses it to make what you would perhaps call abstract. But when you look closely, you see nature shining through.”
“I am amazed by how many good friends she had in Canada,” Bert Holldobler said. It’s why she stayed here instead of returning to Germany, he believes.
She published books, and expanded her photography (including annual calendars of gardening photos.)
“She did these incredible large, beautiful paintings of something you would say you would not paint — a cabbage! In Turid’s hands, it became a gorgeous piece of art.”
The cabbage is one of three paintings that hung at the Queen’s University biology station at Lake Opinicon, where Turid’s friend Raleigh Robertson was the director for 33 years. Two other paintings hung with it. They show Swiss chard.
An artist friend once told Robertson, “Turid sees the beauty in a cabbage while the rest of us are just making coleslaw.”
“My garden is my work,’’ she told a Citizen reporter in 1996.
“Never do I work inside. Always I use natural light. I often wander in my garden at all hours of the day trying to find the best spot to take a photograph.
“When the light is right in the early morning or late evening, I don’t have much time but I know exactly how I can place an object to look its best,’’ she said.
Her photos have appeared in books, including The Harrowsmith Salad Garden and The Harrowsmith Annual Garden, which she co-authored. They also appeared in the Harrowsmith herb and garden calendars.
Canadian Gardening magazine was so impressed that it awarded her garden the grand prize in its 1994 Garden of the Year contest.
It was not a city garden but “a garden in the woods,” she told visitors.
Wildflowers such as ox-eye daisies, fireweed, musk-mallow and bladder campion grew among the domestic peonies, delphiniums and lilies. There were highbush cranberries and purple-flowering raspberries mingled with European cowslips and red-eyed flax, and echscholzia from Arizona, where she once lived. She let the radicchio spread on its own. “The deer have a taste for it,’’ she explained.
Tracy Read was her friend and editor.
“Camden House produced a line of large-format full-colour wall calendars that were distributed throughout North America by Firefly Books, and Turid’s work (photography) always appeared in the Wildflowers calendar. We called in material from the best photographers in North America, ” she recalls. “Her work stood out easily.
“Eventually, she was the sole contributor to a herbs calendar, a perennial bestseller. She also worked on a couple of other books with us, one called The Salad Garden, written by Merilyn Simonds, photography by Turid, and another called The Color Garden, for which Turid did beautiful illustrative watercolours.”
She returned often to visit Germany, especially Wurzburg, and spent winters in Costa Rica, but never left her friends and her home in the Opinicon forest.