Art and nature

Art can pop up in the most unlikely places. It's not relegated to galleries or museums.

SE Live has written about art in school cafeterias, stairwells and yards. Here's another: the Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center. It was news to me.

The Nature Center welcomes visitors into its educational and stimulating depths through a tall, bright hallway. Each month it displays different nature-related works by local and regional artists in this hallway. This month Louise Bodenheimer has mixed media pieces that depict insects found in Southeast Missouri.

Bodenheimer's 5-by-7-inch insect reproductions use drawing, torn paper, stamped letters and silver or gold paint pens to show bugs like a katydid or hummingbird clearwing moth. She layered small sheet music with the horn beetle, and she framed each insect in a shadow box, making the bunch look like a colorful, whimsical bug collection.

The bright, creative displays were meant to encourage people to "have fun with insects," she said. The size and details of the bugs in the drawings are accurate, Bodenheim said, but the colors are not.

Bodenheimer is a professor and area head of the graphic design program at Southeast Missouri State University.

She said her true love is seashells and marine life, but she settles for insects in Missouri. Most of her art focuses on nature -- botanical drawings or marine life. She's a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and the American Society of botanical Illustrators.

The insect art is only up at the Nature Center for another few days. Get down there today or Friday to enjoy it and the other educational exhibits in the center. She said the work might get shipped to other nature centers in the state and probably be included in the annual Southeast faculty art show.

In August, the hallway will befilled with the exhibit "Get Wild with Nature" by photographer Chris Klinkhardt. In September, a collection of abstract nature art and photography entitled "Nature in the Abstract" will be displayed.