Botanical Illustrator Sharon Gross Brings “Circle of Life” to Bath County

Botanical Illustrator Sharon Gross Brings “Circle of Life” to Bath County

By Danny Cardwell · Allegheny Mountain Radio

Earlier this month I had a chance to sit down with the Virginia poet Terry Rae Hall, a resident at the Red House Residency in Bath County. This week the artist who followed her stopped by the studio — Sharon Gross, a botanical illustrator and Master Gardener from Skippack, Pennsylvania.

Sharon has been a Master Gardener for twenty years. About seven years ago, she started taking art classes, working in acrylics through her local school district’s evening program. Eventually she found her way to botanical illustration through the Philadelphia Society of Botanical Illustrators, where she now serves on the board. She studied with Margaret Saylor at Chanticleer Garden, and her work has been shown at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

The path into the arts started, in part, at a gallery counter. Before she was making the work, Sharon spent years at Schang-Hai Gallery framing other people’s.

“I’ve always been artistic,” she said. “I used to say, oh, I’m not an artist, but I’m artistic. I liked drawing growing up. My sister’s a wonderful artist, and both my parents have skills — art skills and carpentry skills and that sort of thing. And, as you said, I worked at a gallery and saw other people’s art and just kind of thought, well, I can do this.”

That was the moment she signed up for the school district’s evening acrylic classes. What eventually pulled her toward botanical illustration wasn’t dissatisfaction with acrylics — it was something older than that.

“I’m a traditionalist, I think,” she said. “I like looking at traditional artworks. I mean, I like modern art too, but I like the landscapes, and the botanical illustrations intrigued me as well.”

She asked someone displaying botanical illustrations whether they taught, or knew of a place that did. That’s how she found the Philadelphia Society of Botanical Illustrators, which is a regional circle of the American Society of Botanical Artists. For anyone locally who’s curious about the form, she mentioned the ASBA as a starting point.

When I asked her whether her art and her gardening were the same conversation, she pushed back gently — in the useful way an artist should.

“Art should tell a story, in my opinion,” she said. “And botanical illustration tells the story of a particular plant. There’s so many interesting plants out there. And a lot of focus currently is on native plants and ecosystem relationships — what plants support what other organisms and that sort of thing. So a botanical illustration, you can just draw the flower and a few of the leaves and call it done. Or you can draw the flower and maybe the fruit that develops, you can draw the seeds, and make a whole illustration of how that plant grows.”

That instinct — to draw the whole life of a plant, not just its prettiest moment — is what led her to the series she’s been developing during her time in Bath County. She calls it “Circle of Life.”

She traced part of the idea back to last year’s Philadelphia Flower Show, which took roots as its theme.

“I’m really into trees,” she said. “I’m like, how am I gonna do the roots of a tree? So I have a redbud tree that produces a lot of seedlings. I dug up one of the seedlings, and I just drew the seedling.”

That way of thinking has stretched into a larger project.

“So the circle of life is sort of not just the idea of one beautiful flower or one beautiful piece of creation,” she said, “but the melding of it all together — how organisms, pollinators, and all of it together sort of feed the beauty of that one subject.”

The Red House Residency isn’t her first artist residency. She spent time on Star Island — a conference center on an island up in New Hampshire — in a big old hotel with wooden floors that housed two hundred people at a time. The setting was striking. It was not, however, quiet.

“It was noisy,” she said. “Even when I was outside, they had bulldozers out there moving rocks around to build up the island.”

She started looking for something different. Her son had gone to school at Emory & Henry College, so this part of Virginia was already on her radar. That’s how she found the Red House.

What she’s gotten from Bath County so far, besides quiet, is a lot of ground to cover. She brought an e-bike along, has been riding around Millboro up near the residency, and had a Jackson River trail ride planned for right after our conversation ended.

She also has something planned for anyone in Bath County who wants to make something with their own hands.

On Saturday, September 26, at 2 p.m., Sharon Gross will lead a workshop called “Design and Paint Your Own Hex Sign” at The BEAR in Hot Springs, presented in connection with the Red House Residency.

Hex signs, she explained, are a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition — circular painted signs, hung on the sides of barns, with motifs drawn from German folk art. She learned to make them in the third grade from a teacher back home, and now she teaches them.

“We’re gonna learn how to make a circle with a compass, and then how to divide it up into even portions to make stars, and that sort of thing,” she said. “We’re gonna do it on twelve-inch square boards that people can paint and then take home and put on the side of the barn if they want, or display it somewhere in their house.”

She’ll bring stencils for anyone who wants them. No prior art experience required.