STORY BEHIND THE ART OF DEBORAH KEYSER DION

21st Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists at Wave Hill

Dahlia 'Black Magic'

Dahlia "Black Magic'

How I came to paint the dahlias is a journey that started about 20 years ago. I did over sixty illustrations for a book titled Watering Wilted Flowers, a Healing Guide for Women that was published by Running Press Book Publishers in 1998. In 2013, upon retiring from various day jobs and the commercial art field, I decided that I wanted to create a similar book, but this time, I wanted to do illustrations that were botanically accurate. Very much inspired by the work I saw on the ASBA website, I began studying at the New York Botanical Garden in the certificate program. In 2017 I was awarded a certificate with honors in Botanical Art and Illustration from the NYBG.

 This painting was part of the final project for my certificate, which was to create several pages for a proposed book about the healing properties of flowers. The first flower that I chose was a dark red dahlia. I saw them growing in a friend’s garden and loved the color and the way it changed as the light hit the petals.

 I was very interested to learn some history about dahlias. They are the national flower of Mexico, originally called the cocoxochitl. A Swedish botanist and student of Carl Linnaeus, Andreas Dahl, received seeds of the cocoxochitl from his Spanish friend Antonio José Cavanilles. Dahl began crossing plant lines and creating new flowers from the seeds. In 1789 the King of Spain held a festival to celebrate the Spanish discovery of cocoxochitl. Because the Aztec name was so difficult to pronounce, the king honoured Dahl for his development of new plants and renamed them dahlias1. Another source says that in 1791 Cavanilles named the Asteraceae genus Dahlia to honor his friend.

 My research found references to medical and nutritional properties of this beautiful flower. Dahlias were once an important root crop and medicinal plant among the pre-Columbian Indians of central Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala. Its roots were valued for both the nutritious inulin stored inside them and for the antibiotic compounds concentrated in the skin of the tubers2.

I picked watercolor as it is my medium of choice. I spent a good deal of time on graphite studies and the composition. I did many drawings on tissue paper and reworked the composition multiple times. The piece took almost six months to create from studies to finished painting. The composition is based on the golden ratio with the intended center of interest being the bud under the dahlia on the left. It took careful planning to arrange the leaves and the stems to show three different views of the flower. The challenges were to depict the red color as it changed depending on the light and also to arrange the leaves to work with the composition. I studied the properties of the colors as to transparency and bias, using cooler and warmer hues to create depth. One of the best surprises was discovering how much I loved the process.

1 Year of The Dahlia Celebrates the Colorful History of a Welcome Immigrant, January 31, 1988, Art Kozelka, The Chicago Tribune

2 Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 1985, Sep. 14 (1):75-82

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