Viridity: A State of Greeness

8 x 10 watercolour on Arches 140# cold-pressed paper

This painting is the product of a negative-painting, limited-palette exercise. It’s of the imagination, not of a specific place. I named it “Viridity” for its state of ‘greenness’. The word, viridity, is from the latin, viriditas. What a great word. Writer Kim Stanley Robinson used it to mean “the green force of life, expanding into the Universe”; the Abbess, Hildegarde von Bingen of the 12th century, used it in reference to the divinity of nature, to its vitality and fecundity, a metaphor for spiritual and physical health. I like that.