Mountain Laurel Evening is a luminous studio acrylic painting that captures the breathtaking beauty of blooming mountain laurel on Don Yaun’s 11½-acre wooded homestead in Buford, Georgia. This 18″ × 24″ work, like a previous painting, Mountain Laurel, celebrates one of the reasons the property stole their hearts in the early 1980s: larger areas of these magnificent flowering trees in peak bloom. Don was mesmerized the first time he saw mountain laurel up close—the flowers transition through intricate shapes, eventually bursting open like delicate umbrellas to reveal their exquisite, complicated structure. Clustered in dense masses, the white blooms blanket the trees like fresh snow, creating an unforgettable, almost magical display of natural elegance.
To compose the painting, Don positioned the reference photo from a low angle, looking upward through the flowers toward the evening sky. This created soft pastel blues and lavenders in the background for contrast, while the foreground blooms are rendered with crisp detail and a shallow depth of field. Distant flowers soften and blur, enhancing the sense of depth and atmosphere in this serene evening scene.
About Mountain Laurel Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) is an evergreen shrub native to eastern North America, known for its showy clusters of bowl-shaped flowers ranging from white to pink. In Georgia, it thrives in acidic, well-drained woodland soils and blooms profusely in late spring to early summer, often forming dense thickets that are a signature of Appalachian and Piedmont forests. The flowers are intricate and beautiful, but the plant is toxic if ingested—its beauty comes with a natural caution.
