A modern version of the early explorers sketchbook journals: The pansy entry with calligraphic lettering.
I get a real buzz when I wander through gardens and native bush and find flowers, like this pansy, that make my heart sing. Like the early explorers with a passion for capturing the wonders of nature in sketches, paintings and words, I love to paint flowers and write about them in my handcrafted sketchbooks, drawing on the knowledge obtained from those before me about their botany, habits and behaviours.
When I first laid eyes on this exquisite pansy growing in a pot in my mother’s garden, I was taken aback by the stunning contrast of deep blue/purple velvet and soft violet petals, with a splash of gold to make the whole bloom pop. Like, how does nature produce such a beautiful visual display? I knew then and there I wanted to paint it.
I have often felt like one of the early explorer’s who travelled the world in the 18th century, driven by curiosity about nature. I can identify with the desire to find new and amazing flowers and plants and document them in sketchbooks and journals. I have been particularly inspired by female artists of the 18th and 19th centuries who collected, painted and recorded the details of many flowers and plants across the world. Marianne North journeyed from England, at great personal risk, to far flung exotic places to pursue her passion for painting amazing blooms, and women in the colonies, like Ellis Rowan and Fanny Anne Charsley, painted closer to home, documenting local flowers for botanists and the public.
Painting in sketchbooks that I make with good quality watercolour paper has become my new medium for exploring the wonders of flowers. I’ve been handcrafting my own personal journals for some years now, so it’s been a pleasure to create beautiful books to house my paintings and musings about flowers. Recently I began learning the ancient art of calligraphy so I can incorporate beautiful lettering to narrate the stories that accompany my artworks.
This pansy painted in my current sketchbook comes from the Viola genus and is a modern cultivar derived originally from the wild pansy, Viola tricolor. It has been crossed with other viola’s over several hundred years to create the great variety of colours and larger blooms we see today, which mostly bear the botanical identification Viola x wittrockiana.
Whilst the fascinating history of the pansy relates almost entirely to the wild pansy (which I have written about in another journal entry), in Victorian times the cultivated pansy was said to convey ‘loving thoughts’ when gifted to a friend. The word pansy is derived from the French pensee, meaning ‘thought’, which was expanded to this lovely gesture of kindness in the old language of flowers.