Alchemy and Innocents: Works by Anastasia Traina

Berkshire Botanical Garden’s 2023 art season continues with “Alchemy and Innocents,” featuring works by Anastasia Traina, from May 5 through June 25, in the Leonhardt Art Galleries.

The opening reception was Friday, May 5, from 5 to 7 p.m. 

In “Alchemy and Innocents,” Traina, a writer, director and artist, illuminates the botanical world and its hidden creatures by building a Nouveau-Victorian landscape inhabited by magical insects and fauna placed into realistic botanic backdrops. Her inspiration is the nature found in her backyard, fairy tales from around the globe, natural history, and Victorian culture. 

By embracing watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, hand- pressed paper, kiln cast glass, and pate de verre, the work seeks to excite and inspire audiences to rediscover the efflorescing beauty already around them — giving us an even more profound sense of wonder and appreciation for the extraordinary reality within our own little corner. 

Traina, originally from the cinnamon-scented concrete of New York City, now lives in the verdant village of East Chatham, N.Y., with her husband; her faithful dog, Fanny Brawne; her 40,000 bees; and grass beneath her feet. Having traveled the world at a young age and become a successful actress, writer and director in theater and film, she eventually found herself at a crossroads, like so many of us do. She soon discovered other media through which to tell her story. She forged her way into glass sculpture and botanical art. 

Her work includes the fairy, flora and fauna of the botanical art world, sculpture, glass kiln casting, and the lost art of pate verre.

She studied botanical art at the prestigious New York Botanical Garden, graduating with high honors and has gone on to show this work in multiple galleries and fine art magazines. Traina was awarded funding to study at the famed Corning Glass Studios and Urban Glass Studios in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is a 2022 recipient of the Martha Boschen Porter Fund.

Gallery hours for “Alchemy and Innocents” are seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.