1st Place winner
Prunus salicinca Lindl. 'Shiho' (As a fruit farmer and breeder)
DESCRIPTION
When filing a plant patent application, we keep various records to identify varieties and to compare with similar varieties. A collection of these records is called a characteristic table. As a fruit farmer and breeder, I continue to use photographic techniques to combine the important items in the trait table into a single piece of work, such as botanical art. This is because I thought that it would be more efficient to be able to list the characteristics with photographs rather than identifying the varieties by comparing them with the characteristic table that spans dozens of pages. (Next, I think you should compare in more detail using the characteristic table.) Botanical art also evolved from the study of medicinal herbs, which identifies varieties such as medicinal herbs, and after a huge number of plants recorded in a foreign land as far away as in the Age of Discovery, its detailed depiction became a work of art. It has been highly evaluated, and even now it is loved and continues as an art. I continue to make efforts to create works that can be identified based on the methods of scholars at the time and that express the beauty of plants, using modern technology that has been developed with photographic technology and has made digital editing easier. AUTHOR
Masumi Shiohara was born in 1974 in Nagano, Japan. He worked at a micro-machining company as a development engineer. After leaving the company, he took over the management of the family orchard from his parents and is now running a farm. While growing fruit here he became interested in capturing them into works of photographic art, a skill which he picked up by himself. The inspiration to capture these photographically originally came when he was requested to supply fruit on a branch to a botanical artist - since then he has continued producing photographic art works of fruit on a branch. He is printing ‘the works like botanical art with white back ground’ on vellum of genuine parchment, and ‘the works with a black background’ on glossy paper. From now on, he is keen to present works with the theme of the importance and value of food another line of work he is involved in.