Naturally Yours

Natural history artist Kelly Leahy-Radding is a passionate woman of diverse talent. She is a painter of botanicals and wildlife, spinner and painter of home-grown yarn, farmer, graphic designer by trade, avid amateur wildlife photographer, and entrepreneur. Dismay is not in the mix.

Her botanicals feature birds and originate from her experiences in nature and gardens. Most are scenes she has photographed. For example, Radding recently photographed a grove of mountain laurel to paint from for an upcoming show.

“I didn’t know what kind of bird I would do – maybe a chickadee or just a regular old bird. I’m sitting there photographing and an American redstart, (I’ve never seen a male before) just flew in and perched on the branch in front of me. I said ‘OK, I guess you want to be in my oil painting.’ That’s how my paintings come to be.”

She photographed a flock of Mountain Bluebirds flying around in sage brush and rabbit brush while hiking in Yellowstone National Park on a blustery day and hummingbirds in Coast Rica at the break of dawn because they’re too chilled to fly yet. Those are the things that allure.

Critics consider her birds and botanicals not “botanical” art because, they feel, the work features the bird, not the botanical. “I paint where my heart is and what captures me at that time. I will continue to do paintings with birds because they’re very important to me.

“Brooklyn Botanic Garden Floralegium Society welcomes me to put birds in my paintings, which is apropos because it’s a depiction of their gardens and the birds as pollinators and the bugs and the moths and butterflies, I think, are just as important. If they weren’t there the plants wouldn’t be there and vice versa. As much as people are telling me they’re not strict botanicals, so what. To me they’re very important.”