FARRAH MAFFAI staff Titled “A Head Above the Rest,” the graphic above by Florence Bramley Hill stands at the entrance of the African veldt at the Memphis Zoo. At right is a panel Hill designed for the Bergen County Zoo to depict the story of the tamarin monkeys, which are almost extinct in Brazil. Career in zoological illustration, travel, love of nature drive her work
BY LINDA DeNICOLA
Staff Writer
For Keyport artist Florence Bramley Hill, the words to a popular Ray Stevens song, “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” are not just lyrics; the sentiment informs her work and her art.
Hill lives in a townhouse on the Raritan Bay that reflects her appreciation for the beauty in all things great and small. She has a panoramic view of the scenic Raritan Bay, where her husband Lew’s sailboat sits at anchor, and inside her three-level home, she is surrounded by paintings, prints and drawings — her own, as well as those of her talented family and friends.
Her artwork includes drawings and panels of the many animals that she has studied and drawn during a career that spanned 25 years as a zoological illustrator. Her work also includes human character studies and delicately rendered landscapes done with watercolor pencils.
FARRAH MAFFAI staff This is one section of a 5-foot-wide panel in Florence B. Hill’s Keyport studio that depicts prairie dogs and their habitat on the Great Plains. Among the interpretive panels that she has illustrated are great big animals like elephants and giraffes, as well as smaller animals like the prolific prairie dog. In her spacious studio, she has a 5-foot-wide panel depicting prairie dogs and their underground habitat.
“Prairie dogs are amazing,” she said, explaining that they have a whole network of tunnels and rooms underground. “There’s a lookout chamber near the ‘front’ entrance where sentries stay, and there may be a sentry near the back entrance as well.
“In addition, there is a nursery chamber, a pantry, sleeping chambers and a ‘toilet’ that is buried regularly. The burial chamber is also underground, where dead dogs decompose after they have been covered in dirt so predators can’t smell them. After the bones are clean, they are put outside the burrow.”
She added that the front and back doors are built at different heights which, she believes, aids in air circulation.
“When I worked at the Staten Island Zoo, I brought the education puppy home on weekends. This helped keep him tame so schoolchildren could be near him and even pet him. He would sleep in the bathroom wastebasket. When he was sleeping, I would leave the door open so he could visit us whenever he wanted to. When he came into the living room, he always gave the greeting yip. It was so cute. I could tell when he was tired because he would begin to nibble at my ankles, so I would take him back for another nap.”
The puppy would entertain himself for long periods of time in the kitchen, she said. “I didn’t know what he was doing, but he was very busy scurrying under things.”
Hill said that after she’d had him for a few weekends, other zoo staff began to keep him at their homes.
“One day I opened the broiler to light it,” she recalled, “and found what the puppy had been doing; he had been taking the insulation from under the refrigerator and was making a nest.”
For 25 years Hill designed and drew the educational materials and interpretive panels for the Staten Island Zoo; then she started her own business teaching personnel at other zoos how to design educational materials on a budget.
Although her panels are signed “Bramley,” she felt unseen. That changed when she gave up her career to paint and teach. “Now I am visible again,” she said.
That may be an understatement. For the first time since 1990, when she had a big exhibition with her two talented sons in Staten Island, she is showing her work in two venues, the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center and the Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse in Lincroft.
“Between the two shows there will be over 30 pieces of mine on exhibition. At the Cultural Center there will be some animal pieces, local scenes, landscapes and seascapes, as well as prints of the portraits. At the meetinghouse I will have mostly character portraits and a few flowers,” she said, explaining, “This is the first time I’ve had so much of my work in the same room since the show at the Bank Street Art Center in Staten Island with my two sons, Gareth and Lymond Bramley.”
Hill didn’t set out to become a graphic artist for zoos, but she can trace backward and see how her career reflected an interest that started when she lived in Texas on the edge of the prairie. She was an adolescent at the time and remembers seeing the movie “The Living Desert” 13 times.
“The first time was when I was about 10 years old,” she said.
When she was in the eighth grade, her family moved to Massachusetts. She got her B.F.A. in painting and illustration from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
She married Peter Bramley, another art student, in her senior year and had two sons almost right away. While raising the boys, she continued to work on her art whenever she could, mostly line drawing, she said.
“I feel that is when I developed as an artist,” she said.
The young family moved to Staten Island, and one day at the zoo, when she was pushing her small son in a stroller with her 6-year-old walking alongside, she started paying closer attention to the educational labels identifying the animals. “I thought I could do a better job.”
Hill explained that her husband at the time was an illustrator with National Lampoon. “We were immersed in very artistic circles at the time in the East Village. I wanted to be working and I wanted hands-on work, not teaching. I decided to see if the zoo needed help with their graphics. I always wanted to work with animals.”
The next time she went to the zoo she met a woman who was climbing in and out of the bird cages where the owls, eagles and hawks were kept. “I was thinking perhaps I could work here,” Hill said. “I asked her if there were any openings. She said, ‘Yes, Bakowski just left. He took care of the arthropods.’ ‘Ugh,’ I thought. ‘Arthropods.’ ”
She explained that arthropods include scorpions, tarantulas, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, black widow spiders.
“I looked at these things and got the willies,” she recalled. “But I said to myself, if Bakowski can do it, I can do it.”
She called the acting director and got an interview.
“I brought my portfolio of line drawings,” she said. “In two hours I had a job. I never had to do anything with the arthropods. They had someone else do it.”
Over the next 12 years, she headed what became a five-person department. It included all of the educational materials, signage and public relations. The department won quite a few awards and she gave workshops at national zoo conferences on how to create quality graphics on a low budget.
“That’s were I learned to teach adults. Now I teach noncredit adult art classes through Brookdale Community College’s Business and Community Development program,” she said.
In 1985 she started her own business, and for 13 years she traveled to zoos. “I traveled from Bermuda to Kansas, creating graphics for zoos. I had two other illustrators working for me. I did my own writing, but I also had a science writer under contract.”
In 1994 she decided to back off from her business. “I knew that I was probably making a difference in how people felt about the animals they visited in zoos,” she explained, “but it was not face-to-face interactions, … so I took a sabbatical and started teaching at Brookdale. I found that I loved it.”