What painting with plant motifs is called

Someone looks for a painting with plants in it and within a quarter of an hour meets four different names for what seems to be the same subject: botanical illustration, botanical painting, still life, botanical abstraction. They are not synonyms. They differ in why the plant is on the picture at all — and that decides whether a buyer gets what they were after.

What is botanical illustration?

It is drawing or painting whose job is to describe a species. The plant has to be identifiable: the number of petals is right, the leaf arrangement is right, and next to the main drawing there is often a section, a seed and a detail of the flower. The background is usually white, because anything unnecessary gets in the way of recognition. Botanical illustration is made for a book, an atlas or a herbarium, and it is judged the way a description is judged — it is accurate or it is not. I know this work from the inside: my diploma was in book illustration, in the studio of professor Janusz Stanny at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

How does botanical painting differ from it?

It answers to no species. The plant stays recognisable, but the painter may enlarge it, cut it with the frame, lift it out of its surroundings or colour it unlike anything in nature. Nobody counts the petals here — what is checked is whether the picture works. Most of my watercolours belong in this category: the species is visible, but the colour is mine.

Where does still life fit in?

Still life is less a subject than a situation: things arranged by a person and painted together. Flowers in a vase, fruit on a table, cut branches beside a vessel. You recognise it by the plant already being detached from the ground and entering a relationship with an object. If a painting with flowers contains any vase, table or cloth, it is almost certainly a still life rather than botanical painting.

And what do you call a picture where the plant is barely visible?

Botanical abstraction — the name people search for least often, although these are the pictures that sell most today. The plant is a starting point rather than a subject: what survives is its rhythm, its spikiness, the way it branches, and that builds a composition in which no species can be named any more. This is how most of my oil paintings work. The road from a particular plant to such a form is set out separately in the piece on how a plant becomes abstraction.

Why does the difference matter to a buyer?

Because it prevents disappointment. Anyone looking for a keepsake of one particular plant from the garden will be let down by an abstraction, however handsome. Anyone looking for a large area of colour for a living room will find a faithful illustration dry. So it is worth asking the seller outright: does the species have to be identifiable. The rest — technique, size, price — is easier; the pieces on which kind of art suits which room and how to tell an original from a print may help. Where the plants came from in the first place is on the about me page.