Through July 2, 2026
Isabella Kirkland’s exhibition titled “Nature of Painting” collects exquisitely wrought tableaux that puts the natural environment under a microscope: detailed, close-up, and in sharp focus.
It’s a practice Kirkland is familiar with: she serves as a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Echoes of that experience are found throughout the show, most notably in the star painting, “At My Desk” (2025). A self-portrait that declines to depict the artist, the image assembles Kirkland’s sketchbook, travel watercolor set, and found specimens are set upon an intricately patterned carpet viewed from above.
Yet Kirkland’s ultra-precise work is not simply a gorgeous rendition of insects and plants, it’s a statement about humans’ nefarious impact on the natural environment. The self-taught painter (she trained as a sculptor at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s) regards her work as a reaction to “the accelerating loss of the world’s living diversity.”
Inherent in her notion of beauty is a sense of decay. The beetles that appear throughout and the bowl of moldy strawberries to the lower right of “Nature of Painting I” (2026) are an example of this, and the beautiful rows of assembled butterflies in “Junonia sp.” (2026) have collection tags peeking out from behind them to indicate their death. The open sketchbook pages in “At My Desk” both have September dates, and the collection tag on the bird specimen Icterus bullockii from the Academy of Sciences notes it was collected on September 5, 1918. The repetition of September alludes to the onset of fall, the season of decay.
Yet autumn also ushers in new life, as represented by the chicks standing alongside eggs in “Nature of Painting,” cyclical time represented by the clocktower in the upper left of the canvas. Nearby, “Seasonal Dimorphism: Precis Octavia” (2020) depicts rows of collected butterfly specimens that hangs next to “Super Green I: Pipevine Swallowtail” (2020), which renders a live butterfly resting on a leafy branch. Nature’s boom and bust is akin to the creative process, which has cycles of flourishing and ebbing, productivity and hibernation.
While species rapidly disappear, art itself endures. It raises numerous questions worthy of reflection: Could art be more resilient than the natural world? Can the experience of nature in the future be accessible only in museums? Collecting to preserve does not always have a positive valence, since the removal of species from their natural environment can threaten their extinction. The exhibition implies that we are loving nature to death.
On the other hand, collecting art represents a different outlet for the urge to acquire, sort and classify. Kirkland herself collected artistic techniques from 17th century Dutch and Flemish artists to teach herself how to paint, a process memorialized in “Nature of Painting I” (2025) where each image represents a different process learned from the still-life masters. Kirkland’s careful observations of both nature and art drive her process towards a well-balanced precision.
