perennial is a series of floral paintings made after the sudden death of Trevor Van den Eijnden’s mother, Charmaine. The work began with the flowers he once photographed and shared with her each spring. In these paintings, flowers bloom, fade and return, carrying memory, distance and grief alongside beauty. They are Van den Eijnden’s first paintings in more than a decade and a quiet tribute to the woman his family knew as the “Flower Child.”
The warmth of spring arrives early in Vancouver, often beginning by the end of February. Since moving here in 2007, I have made a habit of lightly taunting my mother with photographs of flowers in bloom long before the snow had melted in Nova Scotia. But since having my own garden, those photographs often came with questions, answers, and a connection through a shared interest. She was equal parts envious of the flowers already blooming here and delighted by the promise that her own garden would soon follow.
My mother, Charmaine, died suddenly in August 2025. I was already in Nova Scotia for a visit when it happened, but I returned to Vancouver only two days after we buried her. What was meant to be my annual trip home became a tragedy from which I was abruptly carried away from back to the other side of the country. People grieve differently based on circumstance and constitution, and what I came to find was that my day-to-day life did not contain the same visible absence experienced by my father and siblings. I did not, for example, return to rooms that were suddenly empty. The physical shape of my life in Vancouver remained mostly unchanged, and that distance softened but delayed the immediate reality of her absence. But when February arrived, and the crocuses began pushing through the soil, I realised that I would not be sending her photographs this spring. Her absence felt different in that moment than it had during the holidays and milestones that had already passed. It felt sharper and less opaque. So, I began painting the flowers from my garden that I still wanted to talk to her about. For me, these images became a way to give form to my grief, while still conversing with her, albeit in a transformed way. These works are a salve for my grief, but also a way of transforming something deeply personal into a point of connection with others—grief transformed into empathy.
These are my first paintings in more than a decade. In a nod to my Dutch heritage, they draw on the tradition of the memento mori, but shift its emphasis. While the wilting flower in Dutch still-life painting often reminds us that everything living must pass, these works suggest that what has passed can remain present through memory, ritual and conversation. For me, these flowers carry both mortality and recurrence. The work grows from my longstanding interest in grief, nature and the experience of time, with flowers holding all three at once. They emerge, change and disappear, then return the following year. Their beauty is temporary, but it is not meaningless. They remind us that loss and renewal can exist beside one another, even when renewal does not erase grief.
