Apples & Pairs

BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATIONS attempt to depict plant morphological structures in exact detail. These details must be precise for the illustration to be descriptively and scientifically useful. As such, artists often work with (or are) scientific authors. Apples & Pairs was motivated by Botanical Illustration and the Still Life genre of visual art. More specifically, the expressive tension between the former's morphological precision and the latter's intent to not merely create a correct depiction. The composition of Apples & Pairs presents the duo of violins in dialogue, with each presenting a pair of contrapuntal strands. The pitch ordering of each strand is embedded so that when combined, they appear in succession and simultaneously. Another tension that might be important to the work is between arrangement and depiction: the piece is an arrangement of structures, similar to a still life painting, and a depiction of the precise morphology of those structures though the structures are themselves arrangements