Hello COG members and chat line subscribers, a reminder that the monthly COG meeting will be held tomorrow evening at the usual venue, the multi-media centre of the Canberra Girls Grammar School in Deakin. Details are below.
I am sure that with the current Omicron sub-variant COVID wave attendees will be extra mindful of the precautions to take, such as mask wearing and proper social distancing.
Jack Holland
The short presentation will be by local scientific illustrator and natural history artist
Bonnie Koopmans, on "An introduction to Natural History Illustration".
Bonnie will look at the research and process behind scientific and natural history illustrations, and why the field continues to be relevant today.
The main presentation will be by
Geoffrey Dabb on “The bird art of Ellis Rowan, and the strange story of her bird of paradise paintings”.
The year 2022 marks 100 years from the death of Ellis Rowan, justly famous as a prolific painter of wildflowers and as an adventurous traveller. The Ellis Rowan collection in the National Library
of Australia, with more than 900 paintings, is said to contain about one third of Ellis’s work. In the NLA are about 80 of her paintings of New Guinea birds, including birds of paradise. In an exhibition at the end of 2020 these were presented as the result
of visits by Ellis to New Guinea during World War 1. However, it is now clear, in light of what we know now about birds of paradise and New Guinea, that the story of those paintings is more complicated. This talk is a version of one given in the ANBG Thursday
series, and is the result of research conducted throughout 2021, prompted by the NLA exhibition and by gaps in the published biographies. It draws on Geoffrey’s own experience of
several years travelling around New Guinea (1962-1979).
