Oil paints allow Thorogood to capture the scenery he encounters on his expeditions in vivid detail.
Chris Thorogood
To this day, Chris Thorogood vividly remembers the scenery that greeted him when he scaled the highest peak in Malaysia nearly 20 years ago. “I found this beautiful pitcher plant framed with orchid blossoms overlooking a misty hillside vista,” said Thorogood, a plant biologist at the University of Oxford. “I can remember it in a way that is diamond sharp.”
Wanting to record this life-changing encounter with the beauty of nature, Thorogood put brush to canvas to capture the view in a large painting that took him months to complete. But painting what he saw on an expedition was not a one-off thing.
“My work takes me all around the world to really beautiful places, where I get to study and find unusual plants and work with local people and conservation custodians,” said Thorogood.
Chris Thorogood, a plant biologist at the University of Oxford, seeks out rare plants across the globe and paints what he sees on his expeditions.
Chris Thorogood
From scorching Mongolian deserts to humid, tiger-patrolled East Asian rainforests, Thorogood chases plants that have learned to survive at the edges of the possible. Almost as a ritual, he draws the plants, flowers, and people he encounters on his field trips. He often shares his artwork on social media platforms such as Instagram, where he has 68,000 followers.
Growing up in a family of painters meant that art came to Thorogood naturally, despite dealing with objective facts and equations in his scientific career. “Painting for me is a very instinctive thing. I’ve always done it,” he said. “When I see a really beautiful work of nature…I feel this sense of excitement that I hold within me. And then when I come home, using a brush or a pencil, [I] download some of that energy through an artistic means.”
While Thorogood has been dabbling in watercolor lately, he also loves oil paints, which give visual depth to his paintings, almost making them look like photographs. He also often turns to pencils to sketch the people preserving biodiversity and nature that he comes across on his expeditions.
A pencil sketch depicts people of the Banao Indigenous Community in Kalinga, Philippines with the flower Rafflesia banaoana.
Chris Thorogood
In an attempt to share the beauty of the world with others, Thorogood started posting his artwork on social media a few years ago. He also sees this as a form of science communication. “I think science and art can go very well together because art is a very immediate visual way [to] make science accessible.”
There is also a deeper reason Thorogood feels compelled to share his botanical artwork with others. “[On seeing a painting,] in some cases, a young person might decide that plants are interesting enough for them to pursue and to think about them differently enough to do something that changes their life,” he said. “I think that's a beautiful thing.”