Elaine Hodges: Illustrious in the world of illustration

YOU'LL FIND MOST of the common tools of the artist's trade in Elaine Hodges' comfortable home studio in Eugene. She's got paper and pens, paints and brushes, and piles and piles of old drawings and paintings. And then she's got a microscope.

Hodges, 62, is a scientific illustrator. She has spent her career creating detailed and accurate pictures of such arcane and tiny subjects as bird parasites, mosquitoes and even moth genitalia (which are, she points out, sometimes the only way scientists can tell one species of moth from another). She and her husband, entomologist Ron Hodges, moved to Eugene in 1997 after retiring from the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Entomology. She was employed at the Smithsonian as an illustrator in civil service for 20 years; before that she was a contract artist, using the skills she learned drawing portraits and figures in art school to make detailed renderings of bugs.

Hodges is a leading figure within the small world of scientific illustration. In 1968, she helped found the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, now an international organization. She conceived and edited `The Guild Handbook of Scientific Illustration,' an encyclopedic volume published in 1989 and touching on every aspect of the craft. She's working on a second edition, due out in 2002.

In an age of high-quality photography, why does the world need illustrators? "Photographs simply cannot do it, because they are not accurate," Hodges says firmly. "If you draw from a photograph, you can be sure you'll be in trouble with accuracy." Colors, she says, are incorrect, and details are obscured. The clearest example of the problem, she explains, is what happens when you look through a microscope at a tiny specimen - say, a flea. A microscope can focus only on one very thin plane at a time, meaning the rest of the flea is indecipherable; what you do see may be confusingly transparent, looking something like water with a slight amount of texture.

The challenge is to take multiple views through the microscope and synthesize them into a coherent object. "You're communicating to the viewer what's connected to what, and at what level," she says.

Hodges grew up in Washington, D.C., and has drawn pictures for as long as she can remember. "I was a child prodigy," she says. "I started drawing as an infant. I was drawing realistically by the time I was a year old." Her father was a cryptographer working for the government. Her mother, a bit of a stage mom - "untalented but stage-struck" - tried, unsuccessfully, to get Elaine to perform. Inspired by a talent show on local TV, her mother laid down an ultimatum when Elaine was 16: Either work up an act and enter - or forget about dating. Hodges put together a routine that combined musical comedy tunes with cartooning at an easel.

"Because I cared so little about this competition," she says, "I was very relaxed, had great stage presence - and won."

The prize was a trip to Hollywood, where she performed again, and lost. "By the time we hit Hollywood, the lyrics to my planned song were deemed too risque because they mentioned a man giving a girl a nightgown," she says. "The TV people changed the lyrics about a half-hour before showtime."

After high school and a year at Wilson Teachers College, Hodges enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, determined to become an artist. But her life, both personal and professional, was interrupted by a bad marriage. She fell in love with a psychology professor, an older man, who turned out, in her words, to be a sociopath. "It was utterly miserable," she says. "Even on the way home from the wedding, he started yelling at me." She tried to stick it out, had two sons, and watched in misery as her husband's yelling progressed to physical abuse. She found herself, for a time, paralyzed by fear and ambivalence.

"All the stories you hear about women's reactions to these things are totally true," she says. Finally, when her husband began mistreating one of her sons, she got up the courage to leave. Thus began months of threats, custody hearings and therapy, played out in cities from coast to coast. Her husband kidnapped the children and disappeared; Hodges found them only with the help of private detectives and a bounty hunter. (Years later, her ex-husband would be murdered - killed by his own brother, a retired police officer who shot him during a legal proceeding while the siblings were wrangling over their inheritance. "I sent him a thank-you note," Hodges said.)

In 1965, Hodges took her sons and headed home to Maryland, where she tried to put her life back together. Her confidence shaken, she applied for secretarial jobs, never thinking she could work as an artist, and got hired as a clerk at the Smithsonian. There she ran into a woman who had attended Pratt at the same time she did. The woman was working as an illustrator and said her boss needed another artist. The man hired her over the phone, without even looking at Hodges' portfolio.

Next thing she knew, she was drawing amphipods - tiny crustaceans similar to sand fleas - through a microscope. "I was like the proverbial duck hitting water," she says. "I loved the microscope. I took to it right away." She also met Ron Hodges at the museum; they married in 1967.

Her work is meticulous and detailed, combining great clarity with an artist's sense of balance and composition. Hodges often works with carbon dust or graphite dust, literally painting the black powder onto paper or film with a dry brush, creating images of great delicacy. A carbon dust illustration of a honeybee hanging on her wall looks photographic in its detail, and then some - you've never seen a photograph quite this rich. Her work has been exhibited nationally, and she's won awards for her carbon-dust painting. She also does portraits and cuts loose now and then with a wild color abstract.

Shortly before leaving the Smithsonian, she co-curated a show for the Museum of Natural History on the role of illustration in scientific and medical research. "Eyes on Science" included a retrospective of her own work. Hodges says she loved her years at the Smithsonian. "I learned a lot. I was illustrating new species. People don't realize museums have big research staffs, and there is much more than what the public sees." She only has one regret about leaving.

"I never did get to see all the exhibits," she says.

Feb. 13, 2000