Memory, Nostalgia and Connecting to the Place you are From: A Conversation with Botanical Artist Bianca Ana Chavez

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted in March of 2021 and reflects a snapshot in time. To learn more about the artist’s current work, including her new series “California Poppies in Tottori” please visit her Instagram.

All works of art and photographs by Bianca Ana Chavez

Bianca Ana Chavez is a botanical artist living and working in Japan. She grew up in the Monterey County countryside surrounded by six acres of chaparral and a kitchen garden. There, she spent many hours playing in her own imaginary worlds, turning tiny manzanita flowers into tea cups, picking sticky monkey-flowers and sitting in front of her pink heart-shaped bookshelf immersed in her collection of illustrated children's books. Her botanical artwork is heavily influenced by nostalgia from her childhood and a desire to connect to the place she is from. She lets us into her world by describing poignant childhood memories, sharing what it's like to be an artist working in Japan when she's not from there, and how, as an artist in her thirties, she is still the grandbaby artist in her class. Through her art practice, she communicates her wisdom on the capital value of California ecosystems, why we need darkness in our lives, how she thinks about jealousy, and how poison oak, which first sent her to the doctor in agony as a child, became a healing force at a pivotal time in her adult life.

*Gold Rush Series: Sticky Monkey-Flower (left) and Manzanita (right)*

With respect and gratitude to my teacher Otake Goyo 大竹五洋 and his son for restoring the joy of painting in me—Bianca Ana Chavez

GW: WHAT HAS YOUR JOURNEY BECOMING AN ARTIST BEEN LIKE? WAS THERE A MOMENT WHEN YOU KNEW THIS WAS SOMETHING YOU WANTED TO DO?

BC: I grew up in the countryside in Prunedale. During elementary school, there were no other children around, only me and six acres of chaparral. There were a lot of manzanitas and sticky monkey-flowers. We had a kitchen garden with rosemary and I remember catching gophers and making trails in the grass. When I lived there, I had a very, very tall pink bookshelf. It was probably four or five shelves high and the wires curved into hearts. There was just a beautiful collection of children's books. Whenever I went somewhere special with my mom or with my grandma, they would always buy me a book. At that day in time, before Amazon, and even before big bookstores like Borders, there were a lot of small, beautiful bookshops. And so we would go to bookshops together. I remember one in Carmel. My grandmother would take me there and I would spend hours looking at the children's books. I was definitely more interested in the illustrations than the writing. Of course, the story was important, but I just could look at the pictures for hours and get lost. When I was small, sitting in front of my bookshelf and playing with my dolls and being in my own imaginary world, which was very imaginative because it was only me and my books and my dolls and the wilderness, I knew I wanted to be an artist. And that's what I wanted to do.

*Gold Rush Series: Matilija Poppies and Fancy Picture Day Dress*

*Bianca as a child photographed with her dad in California*

GW:DO YOU HAVE MEMORIES OF SPECIFIC PLANTS FROM YOUR TIME IN CALIFORNIA?

BC: Yes, I do have a lot of specific memories of that time, but I would also say that when I was a child there was nothing in my mind that distinguished what was native from what was non-native. Everything was the natural world around me. So it's really important from a child's perspective to think about that.

Now, I look at websites like Calflora to find native plants. That's very nostalgic for me. I think we, a lot of people, have sleeping memories that you can't tap into, but something clicks, like you see a picture of something and then the memory comes back. The internet has been very, very helpful with that because I can look up the zip code where I grew up and then see the plants that are native there. If I look at them, I might have a memory of seeing that plant or playing with that plant; one I might not have thought about for 10, 20, 30 years, but it will come flooding back. It's a really visceral, amazing experience.

Some plants I do remember more vividly. The property that I lived on was on a slope and at the entrance next to the mailbox, was a grove of manzanita almost like a tunnel. Underneath, there were loose twigs and leaves and fallen logs that were cut to be like chairs. I remember playing there and making the mud into fairy tops and cakes. I had so many imaginary worlds. I remember the little manzanita flowers were like tea cups. Nearby was a place called the "Thinking Spot". It was this beautiful rock where you could sit and watch the sunset. I think it's really important just having a place to sit and think. I don't think there's a lot of that anymore.

I also remember poison oak. One time I missed almost a month of school because my whole body was covered. I couldn't even open my eyes. When I would get poison oak my mom would fill the bath with oatmeal and then I would sit and soak. But sometimes if it just couldn't heal by itself, we would go to the local doctor and get a shot.

But I also really respect poison oak. It's a beautiful plant. If you look at poison oak, you see it's so oily, so shiny and glistening and has such a beautiful color. It's a gorgeous plant. When you read about poison oak, other than humans, it doesn't really harm too many other animals.

Right when I started painting the poison oak is when the 2020 California wildfires happened near my home town and I felt like that was the plant I was supposed to paint. It was healing for me. It's one of the first plants to help reestablish a forest after a fire.

When the fires started I couldn't be in immediate contact with my family in California because I live in Japan. I was so worried my grandma would be close to the fires and she's in her eighties now, if she had to evacuate, what could she do? I was in total, complete panic about it. When the fire maps showed it was close to her house I was so nervous. I couldn't know if she was safe because my Skype wouldn't connect and I couldn't call her. So I was writing to all her children, making sure she was safe. It turned out she was fine. It was a mistake on the fire map, and the fire wasn't that close to her. But I really, really love my grandma so it felt close to home.

At the same time there was the coronavirus and I had a lot of personal changes in my life. Poison oak was this beautiful symbol of everything that happened. Poison oak can be really painful and really itchy and a really difficult thing to go through. It's also one of the first plants to help reestablish a forest after a fire. So it brings back nature and brings back life and brings back beautiful things. I saw it as kind of this kind of representation of what that year had been like.

GW: WHAT IS YOUR APPROACH TO PLANT PORTRAITS?

BC: The plant portrait for me is healing, because I'm very interested in plants and botany, but I'm not very strong at the sciences. Art has been my way to show how passionate I am about plants and how much I enjoy observing them. Science is very much about concrete observations. The way I observe is more about the essence of the plant, how the plant moves, the spirit or the soul of the plant. When I do a plant portrait, instead of trying to paint to scale or be scientifically accurate, I try to capture the essence of that plant. I hope that if someone sees it, it will move the person to appreciate nature and to have that kind of feeling, where the beauty hits you in the sternum.

That's worth me taking the time to look, that's worth me appreciating, that's worth me sowing a seed. That's worth taking a trip to a garden. That's worth taking a minute to put a flower in a vase. I can look at it and I can feel healing or peace or joy in my heart.

I love botanical artists and I reference them a lot. I can't be like them, but I can appreciate them. That came from recognizing my own weaknesses as an artist, the things I couldn't do or the things that I felt jealous of. Jealousy, we often are taught, is a bad emotion, but humans are naturally jealous. I wanted to take the jealousy that I felt and recognize it as a good thing. What jealousy really is is that the other person has something that you want or is something that you admire. So it was turning that into a positive thing. Like, oh! Jealousy is really admiration. It's really respect. Jealousy is a great way to ask yourself, what is it that you find beautiful? What is it that you really want? What is it that you admire? And then accepting yourself for who you are.

*A View Inside the Studio of the Artist*

GW: CAN YOU TALK ABOUT SOME OF YOUR RECENT SERIES OF ARTWORK?

NIGHT GARDEN

BC: My night garden series is supposed to evoke the feeling of the sensory journey of walking through the garden at night. The black backgrounds represent the night. The night is something that's really important for me. And it’s something that's been lost a bit. City lights have meant the loss of night or the loss of blackness or a loss of darkness in the world. There's not a lot of places left in the world where you can experience true night. Human rhythms, our sleep patterns, animals and plant growth—we need darkness. Darkness is something beautiful.

Darkness also very much symbolizes the feminine for me. It's at night when we can see the moon and the moon pulls the tides which also has a lot to do with the natural cycle of women. We go through a monthly cycle, which is connected to the moon. Our bodies are mostly water, so as the moon pulls the tides, it's also pulling the water in our body, which is a very feminine energy. Respecting that feminine energy and appreciating the night and the darkness is a time for reflection, for meditation or those kinds of peaceful feelings. A lot of people have negative connotations with darkness, or have a feeling of fear. I really want to change that. I feel like that's not okay. We need to show people how beautiful blackness is and how beautiful darkness is and show how important it is to keep dark places, protect dark places. Just like we protect forests, we also need to keep some places on earth dark. It's a big problem.

When I was painting Night Garden, I started painting plants that were native California plants because they're part of my nostalgic experience and memory. Nostalgia is something important to me.

*Night Garden Series: California Fairy Lantern Flower*

GOLD RUSH

BC: From Night Garden came Gold Rush. I wanted to paint these beautiful gold backgrounds with these native plants, and then it just came together in my mind, like, ah, that's just like fourth grade. Everybody studies the Gold Rush. We make the missions and we study the Gold Rush. We study a tiny, tiny bit of native California education. And, for me, learning about the Gold Rush—how people from so many countries all over the world—move to California in the hopes that they can make it.

I think that that kind of passion or fever or willingness to risk it all for something, I thought, what if people did this same thing for native plants? That would be amazing! If there was that kind of rush, not just specifically for native plants but for all of the environment. Maybe I'm specifically interested in plants, but other people might be more interested in ecosystems or insects or animals, or traditional uses of nature. If people have that same kind of intensity for nature as they had during the Gold Rush I'm sure so many of these problems that we're facing, that we could find many beautiful solutions. If we put our energy and our focus together we would have a new kind of natural capital, so our weight in gold would be nature itself. Gold has so much value. Plants can be value, they can be capital. They can be something that we make jobs from and that we make economies from and they can be sustainable. And that's what I was trying to touch on with Gold Rush.

I'm studying Nihonga, which is a traditional Japanese style of painting. I have immense love and respect for Japanese art and the landscape that inspires it. In Japan the seasons are very important. As the seasons change, the symbols with plants change for those seasons. When I saw my teacher, who is 95, and all of my classmates who are mostly in their sixties and seventies painting things that reflect Japan going through the seasons, I didn’t feel quite comfortable painting those things because even if I’ve lived here for a long time, I myself am not Japanese. And even though I'm in my thirties, I'm still a baby, or a grandbaby or a great grandbaby, in comparison to the people around me. I feel a little like an outsider, like is it ok for me to be painting these things? So I started asking “Well, who am I? And where do I come from? And what flowers bloom in this month where I'm from? And how does the place I was born affect me as a person, even if I don't live there, or even if I never go back? Everybody's from somewhere and where we are from affects who we grow into.

I wanted to connect to that starting point of life and give thanks to it. Even though I might not live in California, it's thanks to California that I exist.

GW: WHY DO YOU THINK CALIFORNIA'S NATIVE PLANTS ARE IMPORTANT? WHY DO YOU WANT OTHERS TO APPRECIATE THEM?

BC: For me, California plants were like going back to my roots and to where I'm from. People who are from California and who live in California, of course, I want them to be passionate about the plants where they grew up. But California is nothing, right? California is a word that we created with an imaginary line. And within California, there are so many micro-ecosystems, right? So what is America or Mexico or California or Japan, even? These are just arbitrary borders that we've put around spaces that have existed before humans had maps. But where you're from, what made that place special? That's what I want people to be passionate about.

I am a very nostalgic person. And I don't know if that's something that other people need as much as I do, but I imagine that there are other people who need nostalgia like I do. When you look at the plants from where you grew up, it gives you a connection to the place you were born. We are not dropped by cranes from the sky in little blue and pink blankets. We're all born from a woman, legs opening up on the earth somewhere. And when we see the plants from that place, whether they're native or not, they bring back that nostalgia.

And when you have that nostalgia for that place you grew up connected to a plant, you feel a personal sense of identity and responsibility and love and connection to it. You know, it's like the Little Prince, when it's your rose, all the other roses don't matter because that rose is yours.

*From the Series “California Poppy in Tottori”*

Artists, PeopleStephanie PennMarch 28, 2023People*Comment