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.
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.”
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