My work has been changing since I’ve been here in the Netherlands, and as a result, my professors and friends have been mentioning artists that are new to me. One recent discovery is Dutch artist herman de vries (b. 1931), pictured here with his piece from earth (2007, earth rubbings on paper). 
I recently had the chance to see this piece and others at the Kroller Mueller Museum (an amazing place, located in the Hoge Veluwe National Park- more pics on my flickr)
I feel particularly lucky to have stumbled across de vries’ work in the context of the Kroller Mueller. The exhibition, titled “unity”, is a tight little retrospective that groups de vries’ work thematically. It is spread over four rooms, and each room takes a theme: “Researcher and artist”, “Accident and Perspective”, “Travel and nature”, and “Western and Eastern Philosophy”. De vries’ has a strong streak of the romantic, but it is a tempered one (perhaps hermetic-romantic-conceptualist could descibe him?). Viewing his work in the midst of this strangely utopic museum, situated within a huge sculpture garden in the center of a sprawling national park, felt just right. De vries has, to me, a startling ability to isolate seemingly mundane bits of nature and invest them with visual potency- the work can be lyrical and beautiful, but it is also rigorous and carefully executed. While often cryptic, it feels purposeful. Perhaps this rigor comes from the artist’s former life as a botanist, a career he carries on to some degree in his art, much of which involves preserving and presenting botanical specimens. Below are:
petasites hybridus, 22.05.02
64 x daucus carota, 2001 (detail)
148 x salix elaeagnos, 1993
(ripped from woolgathersome)



From the exhibiton catalogue by Daniel van der Poel:
“Although de vries derives his methods from science, he is averse to its conventions. A great deal of knowledge is lost, he believes, because of science’s strict, selective way of working. For this reason he focuses on collecting and preserving knowledge (particularly in the area of plants) that is at risk of being lost.”
It seems that in all disciplines and walks of life there is a place for those who seek to record and remember knowledge that is being rapidly lost in our ever-changing world. Art can be one compelling way to pass that knowledge along.