Lilac Vetiver

The story of this painting starts with a book about perfume essences. This is where I first heard about vetiver, a grass that is originally from India but is now grown across the tropical regions. A fragrant oil is extracted from the roots of the plant and used in perfume and other cosmetic products.

I went a little cuckoo about vetiver, doing more research about the plant and its uses. I learned that the most famous perfume using vetiver is Tom Ford’s Grey Vetiver, and I started to hunt for it everywhere. A local shop here had a sample (I loved the smokey, elegant fragrance) but it wasn’t on sale anywhere. One website says that the perfume includes an ingredient that was recently banned by the EU, and so it was pulled from the shelves.

So that explains the vetiver, but why lilac?

It’s a super popular colour this year, and vetiver has an elegance which I think grey does not do justice to. So I thought if you’re looking for a colour to associate with vetiver, it should be lilac: a little grey, a little purple.

I wanted to create a scenery of a vetiver field that conveyed a sense of harmony. You can see the wind blow through the grass. It’s calm. It’s a cloudy day, but not a grey day. But to smell the vetiver, you’ll have to dig up its root.

Something a bit old, but the ideas are still new