Lara Call Gastinger

Education

University of Virginia, BS Biology
Virginia Tech, MS Plant Ecology

Biography

Lara Call Gastinger is a botanical artist and illustrator in Central Virginia. She was the chief illustrator for the Flora of Virginia Project and a two time gold medalist at the Royal Horticultural Society Botanical Art Shows in London (2007, 2018). She is renowned for teaching how to create and maintain a perpetual journal.

In her class, she teaches how to better understand plant communities by observing plants, identifying their defining characteristics, and using different drawing and painting techniques to document them. Her focus is on how to see and portray the structural, textural, and developmental changes in plants while creating botanically accurate illustrations in pen and watercolor.

The subjects of her art come from the natural world and her art reveals detailed evidence of change, decay, and processes that occur in nature. She finds great inspiration in a carrot that has gone to flower, a broken seed pod, twisted roots or insect damage to a leaf. She strives to make a plant portrait in such a way that it reveals its character and uniqueness. Her focus is on the small details in nature, down to the small venations in leaves which hopefully inspires others to look a bit deeper and pause a bit longer.