Description
Norwich-based artist and insect enthusiast Vanna Bartlett has spent three years painting, drawing and writing her personal illustrated alphabet of invertebrates. Her wonderful colour plates bring together moths, butterflies, bees, wasps, spiders, hoverflies, shieldbugs, grasshoppers, dragonflies, woodlice and many many more species. She has observed a remarkable number of these mini-beasts in her own Norwich garden, designed and managed to maximise wildlife.
The book has 26 highly detailed full colour plates drawn in ink and watercolour, featuring the author’s personal A to Z of arthropods. The plates are accompanied by informative text and further illustrations, mainly in black and white, featuring close up studies of individual species. In all, the book’s 112 pages depict over 400 individual invertebrates, from more than 300 species.
Arthropedia is not a field guide, but a personal celebration of the rich diversity of life that sits towards the bottom of the food chain, wisely described as the little things that make the world work. The book showcases the amazing diversity and beauty of arthropod life. It is a celebration of the rich invertebrate life that can be found, with a little searching sometimes, in the British Isles. Most of the species featured are not particularly rare, indeed a lot have been found in my small suburban back garden, but some have very limited distributions and there are a few extreme rarities that I have been very lucky to have seen. There are no ‘exotics’, and all the species can be found (for the time being at least) in Britain, although a couple of my encounters were abroad in Europe.
About the Author
I have been interested in natural history for as long as I can remember and the natural world has been the inspiration for my artwork from drawings and paintings to linocut prints. I found making field sketches of living animals in their environment gave me a greater understanding and appreciation of them and their behaviour.
Insects in particular have always fascinated me with their amazing diversity and life histories. I became captivated by solitary bees when I began identifying and then studying them in my garden. Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in the small creatures that even other naturalists often ignore. This led me to taking on the role of County Recorder for Harvestmen in Norfolk in 2022, adding Pseudoscorpions in 2024.
More of my time is now spent studying invertebrates and I do very little drawing and painting but I still enjoy field sketching when I get the chance. My book ‘Arthropedia: an illustrated alphabet of invertebrates’ is my homage to the fascinating invertebrates that have enriched my life and without which the world would be a much poorer place on so many levels. I hope it will whet your appetite and inspire you to go and look at this miniature world and make your own observations and discoveries, to be as enthralled as I am, and to want to contribute in any way to helping our invertebrates. This could be by putting plants for pollinators in a windowbox, gardening more benevolently for wildlife or volunteering in conservation work or monitoring.
Before retirement, I exhibited some of my linocut prints in the Society of Wildlife Artists’ ‘Natural Eye’ exhibitions in the Mall Galleries in London and at BIRDscapes Gallery in North Norfolk. I also took part in in the Norwich Print Fair a number of times and have had work published in several Mascot Media books. My linocut designs have been used to make Camden Graphics cards and charity Christmas cards for Amnesty International and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Vanna Bartlett.
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