E.A. Séguy
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Growing up, I would kill various insects and worms without a second thought. They were wee pests in my rather dubious understanding of nature. Then came Biology class. Oh how I hated it. But I remember that one fateful day very clearly - the compound eyes of a dragonfly. I was mesmerised by the thousands of photoreceptor units on the macro sketch of a compound eye. I knew right then that nature is capable of much more than I understood and that I had thus far overlooked. Every being in life is a piece of art, painted with the brush strokes of evolution over millions of years. Flora or fauna, we are all creations of nature, right down to the little critters that I used to deem highly dispensable in life…
Séguy… is best remembered for a… series of prints he produced in the 1920s - ‘Papillons’ and ‘Insectes’… The wonderfully lush and vibrant colours… come from the multiple-stencil technique of pochoir printing, usually associated with the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. Séguy consulted textbooks in an effort to bring a scientific level of accuracy to his work and included the species names and geographic origins.
Prints and additional text sourced from BibliOdyssey.