Edmonton, Alberta – Artist Larisa Sembaliuk Cheladyn is perched alone on a secluded stairway outside a leafy sunlight atrium. She is writing in a notebook. She is at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre. It is an hour before her international tour of Flowers of the Bible is launched. She thoughtfully writes in her notebook: “art is a message we send forward to a future we will not see.”

In these last minutes of solitude Larisa quiets the butterflies and polishes her talk. Soon family, friends, well-wishers and followers of the Bible will gather to celebrate the opening of the show.

Back in the atrium, her husband Mich Cheladyn checks out the sound system with the show sponsors, members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He's in a dark green Edmonton Eskimo sweatshirt that reads “Labour Day Classic”. This is a day of labour. This is a classic.

Their 10-year old daughter Tatania helps to put name plates on the 24 watercolours poised along a path of the lush greenery of the atrium. Four and a half hear old Eleanna skips happily behind her sister. Larisa's family has been the mainstay behind her success.

Three and a half years ago, Larisa celebrated the highlight of her career at the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de la ville de Geneve. Her show, Flowers of the Americas, a presentation of watercolour images of endangered flowers had toured under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund. It had been to Guayaquil, Ecuador; Punta del Este, Uruguay; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Caracas, Venezuala. It closed in Geneva, with RHH Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh and president of the WWF, presiding as host.

It was at that Geneva show that a person approached Larisa and planted the seed for her “Flowers of the Bible show. “Larisa, have you ever painted flowers from the Bible?” she recounts the conversation. “I looked at the man who asked me that and thought 'what a great idea'. The imagery, the possibilities. They're endless.”

They WERE endless. Larisa co-opted botanical and biblical experts around the world to condense into 24 images, the hundreds of plants mentioned in the bible. She sourced eight versions of the Bible. She checked out exotic references in English, French and Ukrainian with titles such as “Bible Plants at Kew”, “From Cedar to Hyssop”, “Tulipes sauvages et cultivees” (Geneve) and “Narisi Istoria – Arhitekuru Ukainskoi RSR” (Kyiv) .

She discovered that the olive, the lily, the pomegranate, the cedar, the apple blossom, the passion flower, the grape, the vine, and herbs and figs and grains were all mentioned in the New and Old Testaments of the Bible. She was inspired.

In the past Larisa has specialized in painting poppies and pansies - simple flowers. Her themes communicate universally. The Flowers of the Bible was a natural progression of her work.

Finally, show time. Larisa is nervous. Her husband Mich is now appropriately clad in a tuxedo, Larisa in a graceful black dress. She listens to the accolades, then steps up to the podium, trembling. “Wow”. She says. Then she pauses to compose herself.

"This is an amazing moment in the life of this project", she exclaims. Artists get their inspiration from many sources. Mine come from the people I meet, the sites I see, the books I read and the gardens that I walk through.”

The audience is spellbound. She elaborates on the words she jotted down an hour earlier. “The Flowers of Bible collection is a message to the future. With this collection, I hope to send forward to the future a message of love for all that God has created. Big and small. Young and old. Animate and inanimate. And of course, flowers of the environment.”

She closes her talk with thanks to the hundreds of people who made the show possible. The audience gives her a standing ovation.

She says in an interview following the opening “I'm just smiling because so many other people are smiling back at me. I know that I'm getting across the message that I've wanted to give. There are a lot of beautiful things in the world.”

This is, above all, a religious event. Everywhere, the word of God is posted. It is summed up by the signature piece entitled Genesis, taken from Chapter I: 11-13 – “And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth; and it was so.”

For permission to publish this article, contact Donna Korchinski.