“The Zena Woods are sacred to me,” says Zoe Keller, a Woodstock-based artist whose work lives at the intersection of art and science. “I spent my early years watching Great Blue Herons nest in those woods. I chased the toads and frogs that passed through our yard after hatching from the forests’ vernal pools, and watched hopefully for the bears that occasionally emerged from the trees.”
Over 125 species of birds reside in Woodstock’s Zena Woods. The 625 acres of land is also home to two at-risk species of amphibians, the Jefferson and marbled salamanders. The town of Woodstock designated Zena Woods as a critical environmental area because of the biodiversity and array of meadows, marshes, and small streams.
Keller, who was born and raised in the Catskills, creates large-scale detailed wildlife drawings focusing on at-risk species and ecosystems. Keller’s mother has a background in biology. She remembers spending a lot of her childhood outside and raising monarch butterflies and tadpoles in make-shift terrariums.
The plants and animals Keller draws fit together in one composition like puzzle pieces to represent a particular ecosystem. She is inspired by other scientific illustrators like Jane Kim, known for her large-scale monarch butterfly murals and Tiffany Bozic, an artist who creates surrealist tableaux with natural elements. Keller’s most recent work, Birds of The Zena Woods, captures the birds of Zena Woods, an area of land near her childhood home. In 2023, out-of-town developers purchased the land. Although their plans have not been solidified, their most recent proposal is to build over 30 homesites on 100 acres of the land.
Keller’s projects take her out into the field where she spends hours observing and photographing her subjects. She takes the photographs back to the studio to “create drawings that are photorealistic, but also have an illustrative feel to them so that the whole body of work has a cohesive feel when they’re placed In a print together,” she says. “I used to work manually with large pieces of tracing paper and in the past five years, I’ve transitioned to sketching digitally and then projecting that digital tracing onto a piece of paper and working that way.”
In some cases, observing these ecosystems is not possible. Deep Sea pictures the creatures residing in the mostly unexplored aquatic world. The print has 39 different deep sea animals including a vampire squid, an anglerfish, a glass octopus, and a yeti crab.
For these images, she spent time going through databases to fully understand how these plants and animals behave. “I never work from a single photograph because I want to be as respectful as possible of photographers who are doing the incredibly hard work of going out there and being in the field and capturing photographic evidence of the world’s biodiversity,” Keller says.
Because of the precise scientific nature of her work, researchers and biologists reach out to her to show their appreciation through social media. “My favorite part of my job is to connect with so many cool scientists who are out studying the animals that I’m drawing. It’s such a fangirl moment to talk to someone who’s actually studying salamanders for their career.”
Although Woodstock is her home, she’s completed artist residencies in national parks in Oregon, Arkansas, California, and Maine. Most noticeably, she spent a month in Zion National Park in Utah, studying big horned sheep and condors in their natural habitat. During her time in Zion, she drew a series of graphite drawings picturing the diverse species in the park. Common Songbirds and Butterflies of Zion National Park features 28 different species of birds and 16 butterflies. Zion At Night pictures the nocturnal world of the park with the western red bat, the giant desert hairy scorpion, and the bridges evening primrose.
Although Keller’s work has taken her to exciting new places, she returned to the place that first lit up her passion for the outdoors. “There’s just kind of an indefinable quality to being back in Hudson Valley,” she says. “Having lived on the West Coast for six years and in seven states since college, I realized that nowhere really feels like home, except home,” she says.
This article appears in November 2024.
