Canadian botanical art blossoms countrywide

Over the past decade, botanical art organizations have continued to form across Canada, nurtured by local botanical art classes and inspired by the global renaissance in the genre.

The City of Ottawa's Nepean Visual Art Centre (NVAC) played a key role in the development of botanical art in the National Capital Region. Beginning in 2006, NVAC worked with instructor and botanical artist Kerri Weller to present classes in botanical art and to hold small exhibitions of students' artworks. Today, NVAC continues to expand its classes offered by botanical art instructors.

In 2012,  Kerri and a core group of students joined together for exhibitions, meetings and fellowship. Today, over 40 botanical artists in the region gather under the OSBA umbrella.  

OSBA exhibit venues have ranged from City of Ottawa galleries to a major exhibition, Plant Portraits, hosted at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum in 2018, and to our first online exhibition in 2021.

Our membership is our strength

Throughout its growth, our members have shown a deep commitment to OSBA's vision of nurturing  botanical art and artists in our region and further afield. Members have been actively involved in numerous projects, events and exhibitions.  

In 2018, members created the exhibition, Plant Portraits: Native Plants of Canada,  presented by the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum.

Also in 2018, volunteers from OSBA worked with colleagues countrywide and our partner, the Canadian Museum of Nature, to produce  a national botanical art exhibition and  three-day conference in Ottawa that brought together botanical artists from across Canada. The resulting Art of the Plant exhibition was displayed in the museum's Stone Wall Gallery and viewed by over 21,000 visitors!

The juried component of Art of the Plant included works by OSBA members Ros Allchin, Kathryn MacDonald, Lynn Moore, Kristin Rothschild and Jan Salmon. Kerri Weller was included in the invitational component of Canadian artists represented in the renown Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation.

Our Logo & Website

OSBA member Donna Fleras designed our logo. Our website was created by members Peg Duncan and Kerri Weller, with editing by Kristin Rothschild, using Pagecloud, a Canadian website builder based in Ottawa.