JOY BOMB Peony Painting
Most of my peony work has been about devotion to the whole bloom — every petal accounted for, every fold of color resolved. But partway through Peonies (Albedo), I found myself lingering at the center of the flower, in that first loose stage where the color was densest and most varied, and the rest of the paper was still bare. That unfinished moment carried something the finished painting didn’t quite have — the feeling of the flower’s unfolding, its essence, before it got explained into detail. I didn’t want to lose that.
Joy Bomb is the first painting where I let that feeling lead the whole piece — and the first time I’ve let this peony painting stay this loose, this unresolved.
A Pom of a Peony
The photograph came from a day at California Peony Company, where I was drawn to the “bomb” form — that dense, ruffled pom shape, so different from a single open bloom. This particular flower had an unusual mix of petal shapes and colors packed into its center, and it read to me as something mid-explosion. Life, enthusiasm, the freedom to blossom, all happening at once.
Working in reverse of my usual process
I started the way I often do, transferring the flower’s outline in colored pencil across my working surface. But instead of filling in the whole drawing, I used watercolor to map out only the areas that wanted paint — leaving most of the flower to exist only as faint pencil line, implied rather than rendered.
Watercolor felt like the only medium that could do this justice. Because the pigment is transparent, light passes through it, strikes the white of the paper underneath, and bounces back — which is why watercolor has that particular glow, a light seeming to come from behind the color rather than sitting on top of it. That quality — fresh, airy, a little unresolved — was exactly what this piece was asking for. I worked back into a few areas with acrylic afterward, brightening highlights and deepening a few passages where the painting needed more contrast, but the watercolor stayed the foundation and the feeling.
The result is a flower that unfolds out of a large field of white — not because the rest of the paper is empty, but because the emptiness is doing something. It’s the space the blossoming happens into.
Why “Joy”
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, there’s a saying that too much joy — too sudden, too intense — can injure the heart. The joy in this painting isn’t that kind. It’s lighter, quieter, more air than fire. Still enlivening. Still an opening. Just less like a detonation and more like something finally letting itself unfurl.
That’s the note I wanted this piece to hold: exuberance without excess. A flower fully becoming what it already was.
Part of something larger
Joy Bomb belongs to my ongoing Blossoming collection — an umbrella that will eventually hold the White Rose series, the Partnership paintings, and these looser mixed-media works on paper, all circling the same idea: that blossoming isn’t one moment, it’s a series of stages, and none of them need to be rushed or justified.
Jim Carrey once said, “Flowers don’t worry about how they’re going to bloom. They just open up and turn toward the light, and that makes them beautiful.” That’s the energy I keep returning to in this body of work — an innocent, unselfconscious opening. Not performing bloom, just arriving at it.
Joy Bomb is the first of what I expect will be several paintings made this way — starting from the center, trusting the negative space, and painting only what feels most alive.
Joy Bomb
36 x 48 inches
Watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil on cotton rag paper
Available
© Yohanna Jessup
© Yohanna Jessup, all rights reserved