CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Marcel Jomphe: Between the Real and the Imaginary — Drawing as a Path Through the Natural World

A Curatorial Review by Despina Tunberg

There is a particular kind of artist who approaches the natural world not as a subject to be rendered but as a domain to be inhabited — a practitioner for whom drawing is less a means of representation than a mode of knowing. Marcel Jomphe is such an artist. Born in 1955 in Havre-Saint-Pierre on Quebec's Lower North Shore, he now works from Rimouski on the south bank of the St. Lawrence, where the boreal landscape and its organic forms have shaped a drawing practice of extraordinary depth, patience, and poetic reach.

The biography that underlies this practice is in every sense a preparation. Jomphe studied graphic arts and computer science before spending the better part of his early career as a scientific illustrator for a museum and two research institutes, specializing in botany. In that capacity he illustrated more than a thousand plant species and contributed illustrations to over eighty scientific publications — among them taxonomic references for fescue grasses, Cyperaceae, Medicago, trees of Canada, the flora of Yukon, and the Mingan Archipelago. These are not incidental credentials: they represent decades of sustained, disciplined looking at organic structures at the level of taxonomy, where the difference between one species and another may hinge on the precise curvature of a seed margin, the exact arrangement of leaf veins, or the proportional relationship between stem and inflorescence. The hand that draws a cinnamon fern in black ink on Fabriano Artistico paper in 2026 has, behind it, fifty years of intimate botanical engagement. It shows.

What distinguishes the personal work Jomphe has developed since his retirement in 2012 is the way it holds two registers simultaneously: the representational and the imaginary, the scientifically observed and the poetically transformed. His artist statement frames this precisely: some of his works show us the world in a way we can all recognize; others capture the world as we have never seen it before. Both are true, often in the same drawing, and the tension between them is generative rather than contradictory. The natural form is the starting point and the anchor; the imagination is what is invited to move through it.

The Fragment of an Unknown World series makes this duality its explicit subject. In Fragment No. 3 (graphite and charcoal on light gray Stonehenge paper, 38 × 48 cm, 2024), Jomphe uses the artichoke — a botanical form whose spiraling geometry has fascinated artists and mathematicians alike — as the basis for an imagined organism adapted to extreme aridity. The notes accompanying the work explain that the sphere, having the smallest relative surface area for a given mass, is the shape plants adopt in conditions of severe water stress. The drawing invents a world governed by this logic: forms that are recognizably vegetable in their detail, alien in their total assembly. The viewer oscillates between recognition and estrangement, between the pleasure of accurate botanical rendering and the disorientation of a world that does not exist in any field guide. Fragments No. 4 and No. 5 extend this inquiry, each a sustained meditation on how known organic structures might reconfigure under different conditions of growth or survival.

The Blue Poppy series — developed across a main drawing, a watercolor interpretation, and preparatory sketches — demonstrates a different mode of engagement. Here Jomphe works with a specific species (Meconopsis, the Himalayan blue poppy) that is genuinely extraordinary in botanical terms: its blue is one of the rarest colors in the plant kingdom, achieved through a pigment chemistry quite different from most flowers. The main drawing in black and white, rendered in the tradition of botanical illustration, gives the plant its structural dignity; the watercolor version adds chromatic beauty while retaining the precision of the linework. Together they constitute something more than documentation: they are a meditation on a specific form of natural improbabilit

The Mandala series (seven works completed over several years) takes the practice in a more interior direction. Jomphe has described his approach as combining representation with imagination and proceeding through intuition rather than systematic method. The mandala form, with its radial symmetry and its invitation to contemplative looking, provides a structure in which botanical elements, organic geometries, and the artist's inner life can coexist without the discipline of scientific accuracy being the primary criterion. These are among the most openly meditative works in the portfolio — drawings that proceed, as Jomphe has described, from an inner journey characterized by calm, energy, and humility.

The Borlicoco series and single works such as White Pine, Cotton Grass (Eriophorum angustifolium), Larch, Four Seashells, and Ice Wall form a sustained record of looking — each work taking a specific natural structure and rendering it with the full force of Jomphe's technical mastery. Coton Grass in particular, with its fine white flower heads borne on slender stems, demonstrates the draftsmanship at its most exquisite: each filament differentiated, each capitule rendered with sufficient accuracy to serve taxonomy while achieving, in aggregate, a composition of considerable visual beauty.

The Tribute to Gaudi's Sagrada Familia is an unexpected departure that reveals the breadth of Jomphe's visual imagination: Gaudí's cathedral, with its branching columns and organic stone surfaces, is precisely the kind of man-made form that most closely approximates the botanical world Jomphe inhabits. The drawing is an act of recognition — a botanical draughtsman seeing in architecture the same governing principles that he finds in ferns and fungi.

Most recently, the Eclosion series — begun in May 2026 during an artist residency at the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts in New Brunswick — pursues a subject Jomphe has observed for years but finally had the sustained time to address: the moment of budding, when the bud first opens to reveal the young structures that will become leaves or flowers. He describes this as an incredibly beautiful stage that too often goes unnoticed simply because it is so fleeting. Works from this residency — cinnamon fern, peony, hostas, magnolia, rhubarb, all sketched directly in the garden and later developed in the studio on Fabriano Artistico or Saunders watercolor paper in ink and watercolor — carry the quality of sustained attention that characterizes all of Jomphe's best work: the world seen at a pace that most viewers are never still enough to achieve.

The exhibition record across Canada, the United States, and several European countries, three solo exhibitions, and seven artist residencies confirm a practice with genuine institutional

recognition. The recent solo show in the Grand Hall of the Reford Gardens in Quebec, running from June to October 2025 — accompanied by an outdoor residency during which Jomphe created eighteen drawings in the gardens — represents the kind of context this work is made for: a sustained encounter between a draughtsman of deep botanical knowledge and a living landscape of exceptional botanical richness.

From a Collector's Eye

Drawing of this quality is among the most undervalued categories in the contemporary art market

— a situation that will not persist indefinitely as institutional recognition of works-on-paper deepens. Jomphe's practice combines scientific credibility, artistic sophistication, and genuine imaginative ambition in a way that very few artists in this medium achieve. The works function at multiple scales: small botanical drawings that hold their own intimate world; the larger Fragment series and mandalas that make strong arguments for significant wall space. For a collector interested in the intersection of natural history, drawing tradition, and contemporary art, this is a practice of unusual distinction — one that rewards the same quality of slow, sustained looking that Jomphe himself brings to the natural world.

Despina Tunberg, Curator

World Wide Art Books / Artavita