Essay

 Abstract Memory: The Secret Life of Plants

By Michele Esposito

Is there a relationship between plants and humans?  Ancient cultures, such as the Californian Chumash, certainly believed so; they studied and revered indigenous plants believing them to have medicinal and spiritual healing powers.  It can be said today that we retain faith in the ability of plants to heal us physically, but what about spiritually?  Are plants able to communicate with us, are they possibly our ecological sentinels, do they have a secret life of which we are unaware?  We expect such questions to be asked by scientists, not necessarily by artists.  These, however, are the questions that artist and teacher Marsha Boston has long contemplated.  If there is a secret life to plants, it is revealed in Ms. Boston’s elegantly subtle ink and watercolor renditions of indigenous Southern California flora. 

            Born in Santa Monica, Ms. Boston has lived in San Diego County since 1974.  She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California; a Master of Fine Arts from UCSD followed.  Her graduate work focused on films and videos that highlighted how cultural values are reinforced by popular myths and icons. After graduation Ms. Boston continued to work in film as head of a video production company, was an architectural photographer, and part-time teacher at UCSD and Mesa College. In 1989, La Jolla Country Day School hired her as the upper school visual arts teacher where she continues to teach today.  Drawing, painting, graphic design, ceramics, photography, and art history are the many subjects she teaches. Latent for many years, her desire to paint was rekindled while she was teaching art history. Ms. Boston has considered herself a painter since she produced her first watercolor at the impressionable age of five.  After years of working in the more realistically focused media of film and photography, it was exciting to return to that initial love.

The first thing you notice when studying a Marsha Boston painting is the colors – splashes of watercolor in soft sage, light salmon, pastel ochre interspersed with a vivid violet or an intense indigo blue or bold clusters of carmine – layered splashes that have the appearance of uncontrolled randomness, similar to Helen Frankenthaler’s color-field paintings.  These marvelous colors fill the paper and create the emotion of the piece. Next one notices the lines -- crisp, wispy, sensuous ones interspersed with hazy, strong, concentrated lines of black ink that belie the softness and transparency of the underlying washes.  As you continue to study the painting, soaking in the emotions fueled by its palette, you turn your gaze to the ink markings and suddenly realize you are looking at a leaf, a stem, a flower petal, a stamen – an abstract memory of some part or many parts of a plant. The lines give movement and energy to the plants, making them dance on the paper.  You can feel the movement of a breeze, the flower raising its head to the sun, the wind bending the stem, the roots digging into and anchoring themselves in the earth.  Her colors represent the invisible healing qualities or energy of the plant, the lines the form, the repetition of line the motion.

            Marsha Boston’s fascination with her botanical subjects began in earnest while she was researching the application of recombinant DNA technology (also known as genetic engineering or genetic modification) to our food crops.  She became concerned about the long-term effects of human intervention in nature.  As Ms. Boston points out, for most of our human history societies were hunter/gatherers and as hunter/gatherers “we had an emotional affiliation with other life.  This experience of nature was essential to our emergence as a species.”  Our current alliance with technology has ruptured that bond with nature, and decreased our contact with wild animal and plant species.  This lack of contact makes it easier to be complacent as the environment is destroyed and nature is irrevocably altered.  Marsha Boston asks us to examine and appreciate nature – nature, that is, without human dominion or interference.  She wants us to really see a plant in all its glory and mystery, to respect the elegance of nature that is unparalleled but often copied in human design, and to question the impact of scientific advancement on society and culture.