As a collegiate botany student in her native India, Pachikara developed acute perceptive abilities by sketching biological specimens at various microscopic magnifications.

These observational skills are represented in Pachikara’s watercolor paintings on display through Dec. 16 in the Art Atrium at the Dunn-Richmond Economic Development Center, 150 Pleasant Hill Road.

When you study botany in India, you really have to study the subjects under a microscope to learn to draw it, Pachikara said. You learn a lot of hand-to-eye coordination, and to do a painting or drawing you need that hand-to-eye coordination.

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Pachikara also was able to practice seeing the objects she was drawing from a different perspective, and she said that is important to artists.

When you look under a microscope, you are taught to draw what you see, not what you think you see, she said. It’s a kind of discipline learning to draw what you see.

Pachikara always has been interested in drawing and spent time doodling in her notebooks as a student. Then, as her desire to paint and her skill began to grow, she came across an opportunity to take her abilities to another level in another country.

As a student in the School of Art and Design at SIUC, Pachikara said she was able to broaden the subject matter of her artwork.

When I came to SIUC, I was only drawing landscape and still life, she said. It was at (SIUC) that I learned to draw and paint from a model.

The attention to detail Pachikara developed in her botany classes is evident with the young child’s candid glare in the painting Innocence, or the lush color flowing in and out of each petal half in any of her many Flowers paintings.

Michael Onken, a professor in the School of Art and Design and one of Pachikara’s former instructors, said the visual pleasure of Pachikara’s paintings stem from her wonderful ability to use color rather than analytical expertise developed in her botany classes.

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The paintings are personal responses. They aren’t analytical, he said. I think she’s more of a poet than a scientist.

No matter where Pachikara’s perceptive painting abilities ripened, the juicy and bright colors of her flowers or the dim and bewildered angle of the painted figures make it easy to believe Pachikara when she says watercolor is her best medium in which to work.

It’s my strongest medium because it is much faster and more challenging than oil or pastels, she said. It is very difficult to work over watercolor and hard to correct. There is little room for error.

When it works, the end result is sometimes much better than you anticipated.

The Mary Pachikara watercolor exhibit is free and is open to the public from 8 a.m. until 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday. If any art enthusiast is interested in taking home one of Pachikara’s watercolors, the paintings are for sale.