Once again it’s been a pretty cool and rainy Spring. Last year we had a similar vibe with days at a time of mountain in fog and mist; and real rainy days (which don’t happen like they do in New York or Boston, my two locales before making Boulder my home). It produces a wildly vivid greenness in the grass and the new leaves just starting to come in full as we get ready to move to Summer.
I absolutely love the moist earth smells, the freshness of the lawn with its sweet apple-y watermelon rind mixed with hay, the cool mineral-y vaporous atmosphere that resides around the irises as they open to the world. Since creating last year’s “big project”, Giverny in Bloom for Denver Art Museum, I seem to re-connect with the green perfumes that I have created over the years all the more. Maybe it’s because the real garden I was using to model the gardens at Giverny was my own. I am so familiar with that violet / violet leaf / misty cool greenness meets powdery sweetness mixing in the air with the slightly fruity anisic nectar of the iris all mingling with the fuzzy spicy woody glue-like lilacs around and in my yard. I don’t have nearly the explosive volume or variety of Giverny but the pieces are there for me to puzzle together again and again.
Recently at the AIX fair in LA I got to do a soft re-launch of my “CHROMA” collection and in preparation I was filling lots of sample vials and mini flasks of Celadon: A Velvet Green and Viridian. Again, the experience was filled with remembrance of Springs past. The deep, almost dark forest-y quality of Viridian juxtapose the soft, almost frosted stillness of Celadon seemed completely in step with this current spring, a rather misty and dark mood. It occurs to me just how much I love the green fragrance in all of its forms. Even the muguet in my neighbor’s garden returns me to the roots, as it were, of my love affair with green. This Spring, once again, I’m feeling inspired by the bounty and intensely joyful rebirth, even with its dark, rather cool, and drizzly days, to explore the “green”. Two new designs are tapping on the shoulder of my creative psyche asking to be put down to paper in the notebooks and maybe sketched sometime soon. I’ll leave you to wonder what they are and what will come up next. 😉
DSH notebook 