Septamber 2, 2026 Breakfast Meeting Notes
Prospective member Rick was our only guest this morning.
Bill won the 50/50.
Russ won the chance to draw in the card game. He selected the ace of diamonds, so the game will continue.
Reminder: Please fill the jar with your acts of service!
Rotary highlights: We had a great visit with Ariel Mondlak. We met at the Holderness Town Beach and ultimately decamped to Ken’s meadow to plant milkweed. We also had the cruise show last week and had a good turnout. We had a lot of club volunteers and generated a lot of goodwill.
Tony led us in a trivia game, the theme being “a little of this, a little of that.”
Hey did ya know: Highland Street and Reservoir Road have finally been paved!
Service projects: The Penny Sale will be here before you know it.
Next week Denise will have the birthday cards for the residents of the county nursing home for us all to sign. She and Dan are also working hard at National Parks Day at the end of September. They would like to invite members of the public to hike with us.
We need to go through the Christmas decorations soon, before they need to be put up again. Steve would like help from someone with good attention to detail.
Bill announced that we are going to start working on plans for the Christmas parade. He is working with Alicia for this.
Lora will be meeting with the Parks Department tomorrow at the amphitheater at 1 pm to choose a site for the sign. Parks will take care of installing the post in a concrete base and then we can schedule installation of the sign at our convenience. If you would like to be there, you can just show up.
Sharon spoke about the Penny Sale. It will be November 7 at 6 pm at the high school. She is preparing solicitor packets for members and will get these out to us in the next couple of weeks. This is basically a super raffle and we generally net $16,000-$17,000. Businesses are generally eager to support us. New members should feel free to ask long term members if they have any questions. The Penny Sale will also involve selling grand prize tickets on the street.
Our speaker today is our own member Raisa, speaking about scientific illustration and the responsibility off noticing. She works at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. The area was heavily logged in the 1920s; the forest has now regrown and the area is a major center for research. The Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (which is Raisa’s employer) helps support the forests. She was hired in 2021 to paint a 6 x 8 foot tall mural at their headquarters and then was offered a position. She has a project working with the visiting artists. She also runs the social media pages, holds outreach, and does creative projects as needed.
What is science illustration? It includes textbooks, scientific papers, etc. It helps make complex scientific ideas more accessible to the general public. In the case of nature illustrations, it provides scientifically accurate visual information, show the ideal or average form of a species, makes comparisons easy by highlighting specific features.
Natural illustration is more interpretive, while scientific illustration is more specific. There has been a pendulum swing from enlightenment to romantic era artists (and back again) over the last 200 years. The enlightenment period was very accurate, empirical and encouraged people to be objective. It was followed by the Romantic period, in which artists aimed to provide more interpretive styles. This would include the luminous scenes of the Hudson River school artists, for example.
Cave painting was the first art, dating back to 30,000 years ago. Cartography came next. Then Bestiaries came into play, showing bizarre animals such as a chicken with the head of a human. Da Vinci did a lot of scientific illustration. Other notable artists of the natural world include Albrecht Durer, Maria Sibilla Marian, Audubon, Elizabeth Gould, Ernst Haeckel, and Santiago Ramon y Cajal. Modern scientific illustration is often done on a tablet computer.
Raisa started working by doing portraits of people (such as wedding pictures and child portraits). She then went into a period of drawing art for herself. In college she went to work at the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates, where she learned to be very observant; for example there are specific numbers of primary feathers in a bird’s wing. She largely works with watercolor and sketches but she has started to learn how to do animation win a tablet. Recently she took a watercolor painting of a luna moth and digitized it to show it in flight.
You can watch Raisa drawing on the Hubbard Brook You Tube channel.
Announcements: Mike has discovered extra Rotary hats and two extra large shirts of the old design. They can be yours for $15 each.
Happy Dollars were shared by Denise, Phil, Tony, Mike, and Steve.
Respectfully submitted,
Lora Miller, secretary
