SPRUCE HEAD — As the season starts to tease with sunny, 40-degree days in the Midcoast, a fresh reminder of Spring will be hung April 2 on the walls of Rockport Public Library with artist Katharine Cartwright's botanical paintings, just in time for SEED FEST, on April 11. 

Her "Organic" series featuring garden vegetables will hang alongside her "Music Makers" paintings of musical instruments artfully concealed in flowers and vegetation — a perfect reminder where all those seeds go when they "grow up."

Cartwright has focused on art since she was a child.

"My mother decided I'd be an artist and a musician since I was born," she said. "She said I'd never cry, I'd just lie there and look at things. When I went to Kindergarten to draw things in perspective, the teachers noted that I was probably going to be an artist."

As a teenager, she attended an all-girls' school to major in art and was also playing music at that time. That passion followed her into university.

Earth and nature, and what springs up from the ground, became her inspiration. What's notable about Cartwright's journey is that hard science also factored into how she interpreted her artistic vision on a canvas.

"When I was in my 30s, my husband and I bought a sailboat and we sailed for a couple of years," she said. "I started to become curious about why the earth is the way it is. So I went back to college in my late 30s and studied earth science and geology, and graduated. Then, Syracuse University offered me a fellowship to study there, so I started studying mass extinctions."

That led to a position at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Cartwright taught courses in climatology, paleocimatology and oceanography.

Now in Spruce Head, Cartwright has decades of exhibitions under her belt, working primarily in watercolor, acrylic and oil.

"I've worked in many different series, because I always kept the art going, while working in science," she said. "Everything I do is autobiographical. I'm a garderener, and love doing organic gardening. I'm also a musician, so I put the two together."

It is shape that catches her imagination.

In her Music Makers series, she paired the fluted mouthpiece of a tuba with the similar funneled petals of a petunia. In a painting of tiger lilies, a lone dulcimer is seen as the emerging flower bud of the lily, with matching salmon tones. In another painting, the scroll of a violin is camouflaged with the coiled spirals of burgeoning fiddleheads.

"I have dyslexia, so I picture everything in my mind before I paint it," she said. "And when I do paint, I paint it very quickly."

Cartwright said she needs only to go out into her garden and property, and sit among the vegetation to fully imagine what she is going to paint. 

"I live in a forested wetland here in Spruce Head and we have a lot of fiddlehead and ferns," she said. "I try to paint what I am familiar with, what I have a relationship with."

With the Organic series, her scientific background melded with her artistic interpretation, once again, comes into play. She is not so much interested in capturing the exact botanical illustration of a vegetable as she is in studying its external form.

"I try to emphasize the beautiful structures of these vegetables," she said. "It is a way of bringing focus to these organic vegetables and their symmetries and shapes. As a naturalist and paleontologist, I've always been interested in the symmetry of organisms, because that's important when identifying and classifying extinct organisms. That's how my eyes naturally see vegetation."

See Cartwright's show starting April 2.

She will also be doing a special oil painting exhibition in July to benefit Homeworthy, partnering with that nonprofit to donate all of her proceeds to its program. The large-scale paintings of shells, such as tortoise shells and seashells, will be grouped in a show called "Shell-ter."

Learn more about her work.

Learn more about SEED FEST 

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com