STORY BEHIND THE ART OF MYRA SOURKES
21st Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists at Wave Hill
Virginia creeper
Parthenocissus quinquefolia
I love color. It was important to me even as a child. Color is one of the two features that drew me to botanical art, the other being my love for plants and flowers. And thus my passionate interest in the creations of Louis Comfort Tiffany, which for me epitomize the exquisite beauty of color and flowers.
It was easy for me to choose Virginia creeper as a subject to paint. Who wouldn’t take pleasure in its changing autumn colors as it climbs houses, walls and fences? It defines the season. And the plant also appealed to Tiffany; among his many subjects, he made chandeliers with a Virginia creeper pattern.
A few autumns ago, I came home from work to find a small bag on my doorstep, containing a Virginia creeper branch with red leaves and stems and blue berries. It turned out that a friend had left me the cutting from her back garden. It was very pretty, but the leaves wilted quite quickly and it barely rooted over the winter. I then bought a plant for my garden, and it is alive and creeping a little, but no autumn show and no berries. My friend told me to be patient – she had planted her Virginia creepers in 2001 and it wasn’t until 2011 that she made her first sighting of the berries. So when I decided last year to paint the plant, I asked her if I could use her vine as my subject. She invited me to visit her garden whenever I wanted.
My friend lives in a charming house dating from the 1880s in an old Toronto neighborhood. The house has a small, secluded backyard surrounded by an eight foot high wooden lattice fence. The fence is festooned with layers and layers of creeper on all three sides. When I went last summer to scout out the creeper, I found that it was growing so thickly that it was hard for me to identify a single branch that I could draw. Some of it had climbed over the top of the fence, so I opened the gate at the back of her garden to the laneway behind, where the locals park their cars, stroll and walk their dogs. There I found the perfect subject, a single branch dangling gracefully against the backdrop of the old grey wood, like an elegant antique jewelry pendant.
In early September, I began visiting the laneway to study my branch. The leaves were still green, but there were already lots of berries, in the process of transforming from green to purple/magenta to cobalt blue and blue-black. I returned several times to measure and draw new versions and to be sure that the leaves weren’t growing larger or changing their configuration. I started to make watercolor samples at home for the berries and stems, and brought them back to the laneway to do color matching. Passersby began to recognize me, but they didn’t bother me, whether out of respect or because they thought I was strange – I wasn’t sure. Meanwhile, the leaves remained absolutely, steadfastly green.
Typically in Toronto, leaves begin to change color in late September. But that autumn was unusual, with ongoing warm, summery weather, not just a brief Indian summer. So the leaves on my branch stayed green. By early October, I was becoming a little anxious. While I was attending the annual ASBA conference in San Francisco, I almost held my breath in case the color changed and went past its peak while I was away. I needn’t have worried. On my return, I went straight to my friend’s garden, and there wasn’t even a hint of color change. Then I worried that there would be a sudden heavy frost or snowfall and the leaves would just fall off without changing colors at all.
Finally, in the last week of October, it happened. Rainbow colors began to appear on the leaves of the creeper. On my branch, the color change was mainly in the leaves at the front, while the smaller leaves underneath, adjacent to the fence, hardly changed at all. So I had a phenomenal color range from greens to hot pink and vermilion, deep red, dark purple, in addition to the lusciously blue berries. Color matching was an intense series of experiments using many colors I had not understood before, with delightful discoveries. It was the spectacular finale I had hoped for!
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