Approaching each growing thing with equal importance, be it weed or rare plant, wildflower or cultivar, Julia Whitney Barnes combines several species into single compositions, often to the point where the species of plants depicted are open to interpretation, creating unique blue and white cyanotype prints on thick sheets of cotton paper and then painting the cyanotypes in many layers of watercolor, gouache and ink.
Cyanotype is a camera-less photographic printing process invented in 1842 by scientist and astronomer, Sir John Hirschel, to produce a cyan-blue print when a chemistry-coated surface is exposed to sunlight. The first artist to use it was Anna Atkins, who was also a botanist and is cited as the very first female photographer.
Through Whitney Barnes’ use of this medium, the artist manipulates physical impressions of plants grown locally in her Hudson Valley garden and other nearby areas, along with intricately cutout photographic negatives. Each selected flower or plant is preserved through a pressing process in which each form is dissected and shaped—akin to the preservation of specimens in a natural history museum—and then laid out in massive flat files in the artist’s attic studio. Because sunlight starts the exposure process within cyanotype chemistry, the artist carefully arranges elaborate compositions by night, utilizing long exposures under natural or UV light to create the final prints.