Story behind the art of Albina P. Herron
29th Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists and the Society of Illustrators
White Violets
Viola sororia
Viola sororia, (and the family Violaceae) is my favorite flower ever. For me it is the epitome of freshness and rebirth in spring. I love old French labels with delicate images of violets, pale violet stripes for wallpaper, violets on tea sets, sheets, handkerchiefs. I could happily live in a room surrounded by images of this flower, the scent of it, and living plants. I doubt I will ever get tired of painting this family. I wish the flowers lasted longer though; they seem to vanish with the first hot weather. Violets are also useful. They make a deer resistant ground cover. They attract, feed, and support bees, ants, songbirds, game birds, and mice.
The plant I chose to paint is a white violet that was in the middle of my violet patch. It stuck out because the habit of the plant was much neater, smaller, and more compact than the other violets, and the flowers were whiter, with fewer violet-colored stripes than all the others. The majority of violets I have here are in various shades of violet through blue violet, some very pale, and with many thin lines of violet striping from the throat out to the petals. Violets hybridize easily with other violets, and trying to identify them can be confusing.
I dug up the plant and started to draw it, as it was a bit more complicated than any of the violets I've painted before. I was lucky, as the plant had flowers from bud stage all the way to wrinkled up and drying. After drawing it, I photographed it from many angles and under many different lighting set ups. I was trying to get the lighting just right so that I could hopefully see what I was doing while painting. I eventually planted it back where I found it and watched it for the entire spring and summer. I observed that the leaves got bigger and a bit wilder, and this year I can't figure out which plant it is in the patch!
While painting I kept getting lost in the leaves, trying to make sure that the overlaps showed, and tracing out stems for everything. The tangled flowers towards the right side really stuck together, and I was afraid to disturb them too much, as they were quite fragile, so I had to take extra care to portray each one individually. The fading flower to the far right turned a cream color as it was dying. It was sad to watch that, but it is the circle of life – the painting has buds, flowers in various stages of opening, and then the ending.
Although I have painted violets many times over the years, this is the first time I painted a full above ground plant in gouache. Usually, I use transparent watercolor on white paper. In contrast, with gouache, I have the black of the paper, and I don't underpaint in white, (as to my eye, it makes the pigments dull and flat), so opaque paint on black paper without inherent transparency, plus color shifts when dry, provides many challenges. For these white flowers, I thought that the black paper would show off the coolness of the coloring, and it seemed to me to reflect that violets are usually in shaded areas, close to the ground and easily overlooked.
I started this painting on May 4, 2025 and finished it on July 22, 2025, working most days from 10 am to about 9 pm with breaks here and there. I used a 15 inch by 20 ½ inch half sheet of Stonehenge aqua black HP cotton paper. First, I laid down base colors, delineating the darks and lights. In watercolor you work from light to dark and reserve the white of the paper, but in gouache the opposite is usually true. I slowly built pigment up and allowed it to dry thoroughly. That takes a while in traditional, non acrylic gouache, because if you go too fast or paint too roughly, the lower layers lift up, leaving what looks like a shallow pothole on the painting. It's hard to fill that in and get the layers to even out. After I had a good amount of pigment down, I started working in lighter pigments, reserving white for the highlights in the topmost layers. Gouache paintings take time, especially if you are trying to put in a lot of small details.
I like that there isn't a huge amount of color in this painting. It feels to me like a cool spring in a moist and dew drenched, dappled forest. Dappled sunlight through trees is the most wonderful light I know of, and it makes my heart sing.
References:
https://unrulygardening.com/foraging-violets/
https://extension.psu.edu/native-violets
https://www.epicgardening.com/wild-violets/
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