One to watch

Like the orchids it represents, Harry Zelenko's sensational botanical study, The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Oncidium, inspires great gasps of admiration. It is also the flower at the end of Zelenko's thirteen-year obsession with the New World orchid subspecies Oncidium, and chronicles the author's nearly hypnotic passion for celebrating its many varieties.

Zelenko, who at age nineteen launched an illustrious career as an advertising art director and graphic designer (he designed the U.S. Postal Service's first self-adhesive stamp), began cultivating his own orchids in 1962. Twenty-two years later, at the age of fifty-seven, a time when many people are thinking about slowing down, Zelenko chose to double his workload - often working into the night and on weekends - to pursue his passion. "Ignorance was bliss," Zelenko writes of his decision at the time to create a book with a scholarly dimension. "Originally, I thought there were two hundred species. It came as a surprise to learn that there were more than six hundred." This figure is even more startling when one takes into account the fact that Zelenko intended to document each species with a life-size painting rendered from living subjects. In other words, a painting of a flower no bigger than a small pearl is, with the help of a magnifying glass, rendered at exactly the same size. What's more, the majority of the flowers Zelenko used as models were raised in his own greenhouse on the roof of his Manhattan home. That he managed to render the orchids at actual size without losing any of the detail of the living variety is nothing short of remarkable. For Zelenko, photo documentation was out of the question - the variance of color film, lighting, the distraction of background, and the difficulty of maintaining the proper scale all made that impossible.

Zelenko completed more than eight hundred illustrations for this project, forty of which will be exhibited at the Shepherd Gallery at 21 East 84th Street in NYC from March 31 through May 2. The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Oncidium is available directly from the author at (212) 759-1150.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning