A painting and a plant (no. 2)

Memories of sweet smelling lilac.

Welcome to another post from my corner of the world here on Vancouver Island where I get lost in painting plants and flowers. Today's subject is sweet smelling lilac.

If you love flowers as much as I do you most likely have a memory of the scent of lilacs. They are intoxicating. Their scent stops me in my tracks. It’s one of those things that can instantly pull me out of my racing thoughts and worries and force me to breathe in, slow down, and experience real time.

I first fell in love with these flowers when I was 30 years old and a busy new mom. We rented a crappy little house which was cheerful but worn out and it sat right beside a busy street with heavy traffic. Outside the kitchen window was a large lilac tree which was completely neglected yet bloomed profusely and that tree was one of my favourite parts about the place. It sat right in front of the window and created a buffer between me and all the cars, the noise, the fumes. That lilac, and the sweet scent coming through the open window, will forever be etched in my memory as a bit of grace helping me get through the day. It calmed and energized me at the same time. It was a living wall of flowers which shielded me from the outside world and it made everything in that little kitchen more beautiful.

I’ve loved lilacs ever since we lived in that run down house. When we bought a home of our own several years later, it was one of the first plants I dug into the ground and it still blooms every year. I’ve drawn and painted it many times, but this year I wanted to paint it as a still life, to capture the quiet grace I remember from those days in the old kitchen with my baby son. I chose to use charcoal, graphite, watercolour and gouache to build this image. It started as a line drawing…

And I built up the darker values with charcoal before adding layers of watercolour and gouache. I tend to get lost in the process of painting at this point and I work intuitively, pushing the blacks further back and pulling out the light to move it forward.

My goal is to have enough interesting marks, colours and textures to move your eye around the paper and discover new things, but to keep it quiet enough to hold the magic of that memory of lilacs and breathing in their sweet scent.

And then the painting was suddenly done and here it is complete.

Do you have a memory of lilacs? If you do, I hope it’s a happy memory for you. And I hope all of us will remember that the lilacs will bloom every year, and their scent will waft through the window…and everything will be okay.

This painting is available if you’d like to have it for your own home. Please visit my shop here for all the details.

Thank you so much for your interest in my work! If you’d like to see more of my posts, please subscribe here:

Until the next “Painting and a Plant”, may you find some beautiful nature out there!

Kristen