Story behind the art of Katya Shiova

29th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists and the Society of Illustrators

Bird of Paradise

Strelitzia nicolai

I’ve always found it interesting to work with ambiguous forms -- flowers that don’t look simply like flowers. 

I am inspired by creatures that seem to exist beyond the boundaries of their own biological kingdoms - plants that look like birds, birds that resemble gnarled wood, insects that mimic leaves, or fungi straight out of the "Alien" movies.

Strelitzia nicolai, is commonly known as the wild banana or giant white bird of paradise, but in reality, it is neither a banana nor a bird. Looks like a perfect muse for me!

To me, strelitzias embody the boundless, almost aggressive, prehistoric beauty of nature. Their flowers look exactly the same tоday as they did before the appearance of humans as a species.

I appreciate the absence of romantic sentiment in them. They are not flowers for bouquets; plants like Strelitzia nicolai or Ravenala madagascariensis lack a proper visible stem of the inflorescence, making their flowers mostly unsuitable for cut-flower arrangements. I like their monumental beauty; architectural and savage at the same time.

I had no doubts about the composition -- I wanted to present it as an observer rather than an artist. It was meant to look like a casual snapshot, a glance cast at the plant while walking by. I wanted the plant to look like a part of nature without the glossy perfection -- strong stems, a leaf torn by the wind, dry sepals and solid gothic bracts. It seems to me that the combination of dark green foliage and elegant white-and-blue flower clusters looks very striking and attractive.

I use a limited palette without any green paints. My personal favorite formula for creating green is Prussian blue + nickel azo yellow PY150 + some purple (from magenta PR122 to cold purple PV55). PY150 is the best choice for botanical art because it is warm when used thickly, but is cooler when applied in a thin layer, and it brightens significantly in tints, so it is suitable for a layer by layer technique. And this pigment, nickel azo yellow, as other metal-complex pigments like PY129, has a unique physical structure that makes it reflect more green light. In this painting, all the shades of green were created from one yellow (gamboge hue Schmincke Horadam), two blues (indanthrene blue and Prussian blue Rosa Gallery), quinacridone purple, carbazole violet and quinacridone burnt orange. For the warm sepals I used a mixture of dark violet with quinacridone burnt orange and ultramarine. I used this same color combination for the dried sepals hanging from the bracts, but I varied the pigment ratio. A mixture of dark violet + a blue + golden brown is very useful for creating a wide range of shades of white, black, brown and chromatic greys.

I use only fully transparent pigments, which allow me to apply the paint in multiple layers. To convey the effect of subsurface scattering and shine, I typically begin by covering an entire area with the appropriate first color layer; for instance, for the leaf stems in this artwork, I created the initial layer using a bright yellow.
 

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