Vera Ming Wong

“Interdisciplinary” defines my niche in life. I work, play and delve into the intersection of biology, visual arts, dance and education. While working towards a BA in Biology at Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania), labs offered innumerable opportunities for learning- through- drawing plants and critters (often from the inside out). Later, dance led to drawing classes with Judy Roode, which led to a BFA from University of Minnesota.

Though seemingly divergent, biology and art both converge through reliance on direct observation, creativity and imagination. The collaborative, interdisciplinary process of Natural Science Illustration instigates a closer look at inconspicuous plants or rarely-seen animals, while learning through sharing ideas, viewpoints and creativity with authors. Over the years, my illustrations have helped educate, awaken awareness, and inspire people to protect endangered flora and fauna of Minnesota, native plants of Minnesota, Northwoods ecosystems, and southwest deserts.

Drawing life from nature is my personal approach to combining inquiry in two disciplines. The primary 'draw' of art for me, whether creating an illustration or a personal artwork, is the process of learning, not the product. Drawing encourages me to observe deeply, to scrutinize, inquire, struggle and imagine, to go beyond noticing shapes and forms, or light and shadow; to discover relationships between organisms and environment that would otherwise escape my awareness. Trees tell of the water, land and light that support them; trails reveal the busy activities of white-footed mice, shaping the plants that support them, and the hawks and snakes that eat them.

Looking through a landscape, painting or drawing these remnant bits of nature, I creep through time. Peering into the past, squinting into the future, I discern years of balancing forces in the shapes and forms, lights and darks, positive and negative spaces. In the shades of blue shadow on snow, green haze on sprouting hillsides, or dark rusts in cutting streams, I begin to see deeper, into the incomplete and complex evolution of this land. Natural lands give us portals to understanding the continual process of change, action and reaction, and shifting balances that constitutes nature's processes of healing, growing and evolving.

This is not static land, dead dirt awaiting the bulldozer's gouging blade. This land moves, grows, retreats, supports, actively interacting with animate life. Inanimate stone can be created by earth belching volcanoes, but much of our bedrock was laid down by millenia of microscopic living organisms. Some aboriginal Australians believe that their land is made of the bones of their ancestors. Paleontology supports that belief: fossils show stone created from layering bones and minerals under pressure. I see land created by living forms, shaped by wind, rain, and pocket gophers; knit together by tree and grass roots; supporting vast interconnected networks of life; channeling globally-flowing webs of water.

I survived urban life by finding and celebrating remnant bits of nature in our overly-manipulated world. Through study and observation, I grew to understand and value these bits even more highly, and now I create artwork to try to help preserve larger hunks of more endangered nature.

While I hope my artworks appeal enough to encourage a closer look, and intriguing enough to instigate inquiry, they are, primarily, the process through which I learn to see deeper. I hope that through these concrete by-products of this process, I can share some of these discoveries with you, as many other artists have shared their visions with me.

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VERA MING WONG'S WORK | more about Vera at WARM's website (follow the link to newsletter)