Beautiful But Deadly Angel Trumpet II

Angel Trumpet (Brugmansia hybrid), watercolor on vintage paper, 19"h x 15"w.

This is the second version of the Angel Trumpet flower that I painted for an entry to the "Beautiful But Deadly" show that the Botanical Artists Society of the National Capital Region (BASNCR) will be presenting at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, VA, opening on July 30 of this year. The first painting, created last fall as another entry for the same show, didn't seem to me to have captured the flowers of this plant with as much detail as I wanted, so I decided to try again.

This version was painted on a sheet of vintage hand-made paper that I purchased at the ASBA Conference in Pittsburgh last year. The owner of the Vintage Paper Company located in the Orkney Islands (off the coast of Scotland) in the U.K. came to the conference and did a fascinating presentation about the vintage, handmade papers he deals in. He described the historic process and then showed us a copy of very old film from the early 20th Century shot at the Whatman Co. paper making mill, demonstrating every step of the process used to make paper by hand before the large industrial paper making machines used today came into use. In those days, the Whatman Co. made over 100 different kinds of paper, from fine stationery to artist quality, in batches of about 1000 sheets at a time.

I asked this gentleman how he happened to find his vintage papers, since paper is rarely made by hand these days. He told me that he'd started his company buying up papers from the estates of deceased artists--the artist's relatives would call and ask him to evaluate what they had found in the artist's studios, to see if there was anything of value there.

The papers I bought were this one large sheet made in the 1920's and several smaller sheets made in the mid 1940's which I haven't tried out yet. This paper has the waffle-weave surface of the mesh from the mold it was made in, and is lighter in weight than the standard 140# paper I normally use, but it's stronger than the papers we use today because the cotton fibers are longer. It's also a cream color rather than white, due to the yellowing of age, so I used a little bit of gouache on parts of my flower to make the white of the flower stand out more from the background.

The surface of this paper is also more absorbent than modern hot-pressed papers, so it was difficult to use my usual technique of layered washes. The paper curled quite a bit every time I applied a wash, and had to be re-stretched after the painting was completed. Keeping the edges clean and sharp was another challenge, but it was easy to lift off the paint. In fact, the surface stood up to scrubbing much better than any other paper I've tried.

I drew this from a plant I grew last summer and brought indoors in the fall. The plant requires a lot of sunlight so only the buds that had formed while it was outside bloomed once it was indoors, but these were enough for me to develop the painting before the flowers dropped off. I'd forgotten how large the flowers were--one I measured was 17.5" long from the end of the petiole to the tip of the trumpet.

This is an unusual composition--bold and directly at eye level, unlike anything else I've done before, but I think it suits the scale of the plant and its deadly poisonous properties. I ended up entering both of my Angel Trumpets for the show, and amazingly, both were accepted by the jurors!