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!

Beautiful But Deadly Angel Trumpet

Angel Trumpets (Brugmansia hybrid), watercolor, 15"h x 12.5"w.

I've been working on this piece for the "Beautiful But Deadly" show that the Botanic Artists Society of the National Capital Regions (BASNCR) is scheduled to have next summer at the Athenaeum in Alexandria. I grew this plant for several years when I lived in Columbia, Maryland. After three years or so, it had reached some four to five feet in height. Being a tender tropical, it needs to be kept indoors during  freezing weather.

During the winter I kept the plant in our unfinished basement by the glass door of the walk-out, and I usually checked it only once a week to water it. I never noticed the buds developing, and then one day, as I was going downstairs to our basement, lo and behold, an amazingly beautiful trumpet flower greeted me! The plant had a number of flower buds, and these bloomed over the next few weeks.

The following summer, I set the pot outside by the walk-out basement door, since it seemed to like the conditions there, and it bloomed profusely. I took many photos of it at various stages. After a few years, the plant wore out, and stopped blooming. I moved it to our new home in Virginia, and re-potted it, but it never put out any more flowers. It was so large and hard to move, one fall I finally gave up and decided to let it die over the winter.  That was a few years ago.

When BASNCR'a proposal for a show on toxic plants was accepted last year, I regretted my decision--an Angel Trumpet would be just the flower to submit for this show! I started working on the painting above from my photos, but the information on the photos wasn't enough.

As fate would have it, this summer I was shopping for plants to bring to my botanical watercolor class at a local nursery, and there I saw a tiny Brugmansia in a 4" pot on sale for $3.99. I was looking it over, wondering if there was still time to bring it into bloom before the first frost struck, when another customer, noticing that I seemed to be mulling over it, came over to me. This lady started telling me that she had bought one just like it a few weeks before and after potting into a much larger pot, her plant had grown very quickly and was now about three and a  half feet tall and covered with buds!  I thanked her for the information and bought the Brugmansia.

After re-potting my plant grew at an amazing rate. Toward the end of August it was about three feet tall, but I hadn't noticed that it had started to branch until I saw one tiny flower bud emerging. Brugmansias won't bloom until the main stem has branched--that's the sign that the plant is ready to bloom.

Brugmansia flower

The first bud opened in September, and more have followed. After seeing the flowers again, I realize that I had not remembered how large they actually are, and I can see so much more detail in real life than in my old photos. I feel the need to re-do my painting, the one above hardly does it justice!

Interior

The interior of the trumpet looks very like a Georgia O'Keefe painting I'm familiar with, her "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1", which sold for millions at auction a few years back. Jimsonweed is  Datura stramonium, another member of the same family as the Brugmansia genus whose flowers differ in being upright or nodding, rather than pendulous.

I've brought my plant inside in case we have an overnight frost. Now, I'm struggling to do more sketches of my buds and flowers from life while they last and work on a composition where I could show several views of the Angel Trumpet in all its intricate beauty.