Having received a bachelor of fine arts degree at a time when artists were trained to look beyond realism for inspiration, that subject matter was not a criterion on which art should be judged, and that illustration is not art (and then later becoming a scientific illustrator), I read with interest Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy's Humans, Nature, and Birds and Jane Davidson's A History of Paleontology Illustration. The books offer interesting and well-constructed overviews of the natural history and imagery of birds and fossils. At the same time, the authors use their material to support the shared thesis, outlined in their introductions, that the science found in the images unites the material into a unique genre of art.
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