A Day with Olivia Watkin

For Peruvian watercolor artist Olivia Watkin, living in such intimate proximity with nature has brought inspiration, solitude and a healthy aging pathway. She was born in Nasca – the desert of southern Peru – known for its mysterious Nasca lines, which have adorned the landscape for thousands of years. Olivia has dedicated the last 40 years collecting, recording and painting the distinctive botanical species of all three regions of Peru. Her book Flowers of Peru is a valuable reference and a testimony of her love for plants and nature.

We spent a few days candidly peeking inside her daily life as part of a series of interviews for a photo essay for the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) – a collaboration with photographer Alex Kornhuber. During these commissions, we intend to document and contrast health disparities among older Peruvians, living in rural and urban settings within our country’s three main geographical regions: the coast, the Andes, and the Amazon. We visited Olivia at her home and lodge in Nazca.

Now seventy-eight, Olivia Watkin has the bliss and the inventiveness of a young spirit. Her daily routine during the long months of the Covid-19 pandemic has been filled with concern – like most – but also by frequent strolls around her cotton plantations and grapevines. Despite the worries, she’s been sketching outdoors and interacting with her dogs and her shiny feathered peacock while doing daily chores at Wasipunko, her home and ecolodge at Nasca. While we were there, we witnessed something exceptional and clinically therapeutic on Olivia’s bucolic oasis with how she embraced the natural world with attention and wonder, despite the erratic moment. Olivia told us how her father Bartolomé Sejuro had come to Nasca in 1950 in quest of growing different kinds of grapes to make pisco. He had bought some acres of land and later built a home. Even though she went to school in Lima, her passion and enthusiasm for nature made her return to Nasca, creating a strong bond with the coastal desert.

It was easy to see why her engagement with nature was positively affecting her well-being. It all had to do with the way she related to and interacted with nature. Heidegger’s idea of ‘Dasein’ as Being-in-the-world. In a way of evoking the beauty of her first childhood home in Nasca, she described each flower she had seen next to her father. She couldn’t remember all the names, only some. Later, she narrated the story behind her daughter’s name Lidice — named after the small town in former Czechoslovakia destroyed by German forces. Olivia laughed as she told the story about the time she got lost and encountered some dazzling flowers in Cerro Blanco, the highest sand dune of Peru located 14km east of Nasca.

Her curiosity for drawing came while working as an interior designer in a far-flung mining camp in central Peru, where she encountered lilac pansy plants. She took them home to later draw and paint them and remembered being astonished by their beauty and the way the drawing came out – very much like the real flowers. Following that experience, she signed for a painting workshop with Peruvian painter Juan Pastorelli, who later became her mentor and close friend.

Some of Olivia’s paintings contain handwritten notes describing the varied botanical species. During our visit to Wasipunko, Olivia escorted us around the fields that surrounded her home as well as to one of her favorite painting spots located in a luminous patio. There she prepared her painting supplies and began painting. As she sat beneath the shade of an old tree, she talked about her experience painting the Flor de la Quina and the intrepid journeys she’s been on in her quest for rare endemic botanical species. She shared a few compelling anecdotes about her expeditions leaning back every once in a while to burst into laughter.

During her artist career, Olivia has painted several multicolored Peruvian native potatoes and 454 kinds of flowers, including the unique flora from the Andes, the jungle, and the coast of Peru. Her investigative and curious nature has led her to collect not only flowers but exotic objects and ancient Peruvian pottery, which can be seen in every corner of her home and lodge.

Over the years, she has participated in exhibitions, publications and conferences. The thriving environment around Olivia’s home in Nasca has provided plenty of species to paint. Her relationship with plants was clearly motivated by her father’s curiosity for vegetation, but Olivia knows what’s worth observing and what’s not. Her motivation comes from noticing every detail in whatever she encounters — from insects and huacos to colored bottles and quipus. Her keen observation has kept her mentally active, taking her to select the significant to later assemble and reproduce in different ways.

Her day-to-day setting includes a shade, a tree, a dog, a wooden bench left in the sun too long and a radio song – all under the peculiar hot air of the southern Nasca desert. It’s clear that Olivia’s relationship with the natural world plays a significant role in her psychological needs and well-being. Breathing the fresh air, feeding the animals, strolling along the grapevines and feeling the sun by day has had a profound effect on her over-stimulated mind. Despite her occasional memory loss, Olivia is serene and content.

As she attentively reproduced the bright pink desert roses’ hue on her watercolor paper, we could feel her sense of fulfillment and gratification irradiating.

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A Day with Olivia Watkin