Portraits of pine cones

An artist inspired by nature

By: Al Wicklund
MONROE — Barbara Harding Seibert’s love of design, expressed professionally in a career in textile design, led her to an appreciation of nature and particularly to an appreciation of pine cones.
   Ms. Seibert currently has a display of selected drawings, paintings and studies in the display case in the lobby of the Monroe Township Public Library and they can be seen Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
   Ms. Seibert’s showing started Jan. 4 and is scheduled to run through Jan. 30.
   Ms. Seibert said that years ago, when she started taking a long look at pine cones individually and in all their variety, she was intrigued.
   "When I picked up a pine cone and studied it, I saw an incredibly beautiful rhythm to it. They are all so perfect and so functional," Ms. Seibert said from her Rossmoor home.
   Ms. Seibert then set her artistic skills to capturing the beauty and delicate complexities of pine cones, which can range from less than inch to almost 2 feet long, and she started drawing then in 1983.
   In the 20 years since, she has studied pine cones wherever she has gone and friends and relatives send her pine cones and information about them from wherever they go.
   Ms. Seibert said she never knows what the mail will bring. She has a friend, a botanist who has a ranch in Volcano, Calif., who sends her boxes of pine cones.
   Another friend sent her cones "with scales as delicate as tissue paper."
   Ms. Seibert said, while there are interesting pine trees and cones in all parts of the country, the most interesting and diverse seem to come from California.
   "I think it may be the elevation of the area where many of trees grow and the climate in the mountains out there," she said.
   She said one of her most unusual pine cones is the size and weight of a pineapple.
   "If it fell on you, you’d know it," she said.
   Ms. Seibert has been involved in art shows and has earned awards. She contributed still-life drawings to the Scott Memorial Study Collection at Bryn Mawr College and earned a drawing award from the Ridgewood Art Institute.
   A graduate of Pratt Institute, she worked primarily in design, including several years with Burlington Studio Prints.