Angel’s Trumpet

In Angel’s Trumpet, Jordan paints the Brugmansia flower not as a specimen but as an emissary. Suspended in the canvas’s still air, the flower glows from within, its drooping trumpet-shaped petals lit like a lantern at dusk. It’s one of the most poisonous flowering plants on Earth, the artist says, “and also one of the most beautiful.” That duality—seduction and danger—is the painting’s pulse. The composition is simple, even serene, but beneath it lies tension: a beauty so radiant it borders on peril.

Historically associated with both spiritual vision and toxic delirium, Brugmansia has been used by Indigenous healers and sorcerers alike. Jordan describes the patterns “woven into its trumpet-like form” as carrying “the visual language of the master plant teacher Ayahuasca,” linking Brugmansia and Ayahuasca as allies within traditional Amazonian dietas. The Kené patterns he uses originate with the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon. These sacred geometries are regarded as the visible embodiment of ícaros—medicine songs transmitted by the plants and sung by shamans in ceremony. Jordan’s handling recalls Redon’s dreamlike still lifes, where the organic world becomes an altar to the subconscious. Angel’s Trumpet exists in that same liminal space, where the divine and the deadly share the same bloom.