Katrina van Grouw is a British science author, illustrator, and fine artist, best known for her illustrated natural science books The Unfeathered Bird and Unnatural Selection published by Princeton University Press. She has degrees in Fine Art and Natural History Illustration. Van Grouw is a self-taught ornithologist with an interest in comparative anatomy, evolution, and the history of the natural sciences.
Early life and education
Katrina van Grouw was born in Pontypool, South Wales in 1965, adopted, and raised as Katrina Cook in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. (She became known by her current name after her marriage to Hein van Grouw, in 2009.) Van Grouw states that her prodigious drawing ability led to artistic hothousing during her school education which compromised her academic achievements.
She gained a BA in Fine Art, specialising in printmaking, from the University of Plymouth (at that time Exeter College of Art and Design) in 1990, and an MA in Natural History Illustration from the Royal College of Art in 1992 with a research thesis on bird anatomy.
Fine art
In 1993 van Grouw moved to a cottage in rural Devon and began her career as a self-employed fine artist, specialising in large scale drypoints—a form of intaglio printmaking—of natural history subjects. She also taught adult education classes in drypoint, and lectured in printmaking and illustration to undergraduate students at the University of Plymouth, Chelsea College of Art and Design, and Falmouth College of Art and Design. She was an elected member of the Society of Wildlife Artists, held numerous open and solo exhibitions, and won several awards including the Birdwatch Artist of the Year Award in 1997 (black and white section) and 1998 (overall winner), the Wildlife Art Gallery Award in 1993 & 1996, and the PJC Drawing Award in 2014. From 1996 her subject matter and preferred medium changed to large graphite drawings of geological formations.
Fine art was put aside during the final push to write and illustrate The Unfeathered Bird, and after its completion van Grouw found that producing illustrated books now “ticked all creative and intellectual boxes”.
History of natural history illustration
During her education Katrina van Grouw developed a specialist interest in historical illustrated natural history publications and the printing techniques used to create them. John James Audubon's The Birds of America, Robert John Thornton's Temple of Flora, George Stubbs' The Anatomy of the Horse, and the printing by Alecto Historical Editions of Banks' Florilegium in the 1980s were particularly influential.
Van Grouw has continued to write, consult, give talks and demonstrations, and national media broadcasts about historical natural history art. Projects have included selecting images and writing text for the British Library's Turning the Pages virtual book of Audubon's The Birds of America; appearing in Episode 1 of the BBC TV program The Secret of Drawing in 2005 hosted by Andrew Graham Dixon (again talking about The Birds of America); and demonstrating intaglio printing in a short film about Sydney Parkinson, the artist on James Cook's HMS Endeavour voyage, for the British Natural History Museum. She was a freelance consultant for the Natural History Museum's 2011 edition of The Birds of America and fact checker for Birds: The Art of Ornithology (and Great Birds of Britain and Europe) by Jonathan Elphick. Van Grouw regularly carries out identifications of birds depicted in historic Indian and Islamic paintings for Simon Ray and other London auction houses, and writes accompanying text for their sales catalogues. She has given frequent talks about printing techniques and their history in natural history publications at the Natural History Museum's libraries including the Rothschild Library at Tring and Rare Books Room at the NHM South Kensington, London.
In 2007 van Grouw was commissioned by Quercus to author Birds an illustrated history of birds in art, choosing to focus on the biographies of the artists and the stories surrounding the creation and publication of their works. She also sourced the images and drew up the preliminary designs for the book.
Ornithology
Katrina van Grouw has been passionate about natural history and a keen birdwatcher throughout her life. She qualified as a bird ringer in the 1990s and took part in several long-term ringing expeditions in Africa, South America and the Shetland Islands, She was employed as resident bird ringer at Rutland Water Nature Reserve in 1998.