DRAWN TO NATURE : Illustrators Detail Wonders of the ‘Rainforest’

In her job as a graphic illustrator for the city of Glendale, Norma Smallbone has been busy designing posters and brochures to help residents cope with the aftermath of the recent earthquake.

Smallbone’s first love, however, has more to do with natural wonders than natural disasters. She considers herself foremost a natural history illustrator, a job she pursues in her free time, creating drawings that aim to represent plants and animals with as much accuracy and detail as possible for scientific journals and textbooks.

Even with the advent of photography, then computers, illustrating wildlife by hand has survived and is still preferred in many cases. It continues to be practiced in much the same way as it has been for centuries, since the time of famed bird illustrator John James Audubon and long before.

Examples of contemporary work from around Southern California are on display at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine. The exhibit, “Rainforests of the World,” features 97 paintings and drawings by 21 members of the Southern California Chapter of the Guild of Natural History Illustrators.

Creatures from Chinese liverflukes to Sumatran tigers, along with multicolored butterflies and frogs, monkeys, apes, fishes, birds and also plants adorn walls throughout the center’s first floor.

“People are surprised by the detail and how beautiful they are,” said Smallbone, of La Crescenta. She credits the creatures rather than artistic license: “Many of the species are just that beautiful.”

While beauty is often a byproduct, the primary goal is always accuracy (drawings are preferred to photographs because it is much easier to emphasize and articulate detail).

“You have to be interested enough in the science of the subject to override your feelings of wanting to create a pretty picture,” said Sharon Belkin, who with Smallbone is one of the organizers of the exhibition. The details have to be right, she said, everything from “the number of toes on a frog to the veins on a butterfly’s wing.”

That means studying the subject in the wild, if possible, along with studying photographs, museum specimens, the notes of researchers and other sources. Jeff Preston of Huntington Beach, one of the illustrators represented in the show, spent about a month researching his two exhibit entries: a green basilisk (a Central American lizard) and a long-tongued bat.

Not only is accuracy a general concern in the field, but displaying the works in the Beckman facility adds pressure. “The technical accuracy is more uppermost here than in a lot of other shows, because that’s what the scientists want,” Preston said. “If it’s wrong, the audience in this case will catch it.”

Getting the subject right is half the battle, but it’s equally important to get the setting right. With a butterfly, for instance, “if you get them on the wrong tree, the wrong leaf, it’s no longer scientifically accurate,” Belkin noted.

Belkin, a resident of West L.A., got a degree in biological illustration at UCLA. “I put myself through college drawing mosquitoes for a professor,” she said. Until recently, she produced graphics for the psychiatry department at UCLA while working on natural history projects on her own time.

“All of the things that I’ve done are things that I’ve seen,” said Belkin, who has traveled to the Amazon six times in the past decade. She specializes in entomological drawings, but her works in the exhibit include frogs, butterflies, a large moth and one of the largest freshwater fishes in the world.

“Every time I work on something with a researcher, I learn more,” Belkin said. “I find it a really satisfying field.”

Smallbone started as a biologist, working as a research assistant in oceanography and fisheries research at Oregon State University. “At that time, the art was a secondary thing for me. I just did the art to fill out the reports,” she said. Since then, illustration has consumed more and more of her interest.

She is represented in the show by a series of paintings and drawings of gorillas, among other works. In 1993 she traveled to the Amazon, sketching and taking thousands of slides. She says she may have found a new species of praying mantis and is working on a book about varieties of the insect from around the world.

Finding a possible new species conjures for her something of what the naturalist-illustrators of the past must have felt. “I would have loved to be on the voyages of discovery, when they had naturalists along to illustrate the new plants and animals they found,” she said. “They had a very hard life, but they had a wonderful time, seeing things for the first time.”

What: “Rainforests of the World.”

When: Continues through Sept. 9. Hours are weekdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: Beckman Center, 100 Academy Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: Follow the Corona del Mar (73) Freeway to its southern end (where it merges with MacArthur Boulevard) and exit at University Drive, going east. Turn right on California Avenue and right again on Academy Drive.

Wherewithal: Free.

Where to call: (714) 721-2200.