link to ateneo de manila university art gallery

Vanishing Point blog was created as a adjunct to the art exhibit Flora: Beauty, Desire and Death, which is a homage to the 18th- century botanist, Bro. Josef George Kamel, S.J.,whose tricentennial death anniversary is this year— 2006. This exhibit will focus on Filipino artists who work on flora as a subject. Their works will interact with the botanical drawings of Bro. Kamel and raise the question whether the artist's interest in plants and the botanist's interest are not fueled by the same passions although the resulting image might be different in purpose and intent, audience and manner of communication hence, in its outward look. Consequently, the exhibit will bring art and the science in dialogue.

The images in this blog come courtesy of the Jesuit Archive in Louvain, which provided the Ateneo de Manila University with high resolution tiff files of Kamel's illustrations. The illustrations posted here have been cropped in some instances but other than that the images are as scanned.

Botanical data, esp. scientific names, are based on Domingo Madulid, 2000, A pictorial cyclopedia of Philippine ornamental plants. 2nd Edition. Makati: Bookmark, Inc. and Franz Seindenschwarz, 1994, Plant world of the Philippines: An illustrated dictionary of Visayan Plant names …. Cebu: University of San Carlos. Seidenschwarz book has been most helpful because many of Kamel's drawings use Visayan names, suggesting that he may have travelled to the Visayan islands, esp. Samar, Leyte, Panay, Negros and Cebu where the Jesuits had mission stations and parishes or that he may have been in correspondence with Jesuits in these mission areas.

Postings on Vanishing Point blog will be updated weekly until the opening of Flora on 11 October 2006.

URL of the Ateneo de Manila University Art Gallery: http://gallery.ateneo.edu