Last summer, my long love of sunflowers reached a new extreme. My mind was abducted and possibly lost for a time.
Where to start (and do you even care?)…
I appreciate sunflowers. They’re fascinating at every stage, transforming from urchin-like buds into towering trees that withstand the fierce winds and blazing heat of summer. I’ve seen them sprout from cracked sidewalks, neglected roadside ditches, crumbling rock walls, and bird-feeding stations. Their stubborn will to LIVE and to BLOOM is admirable, enviable, and poetic. In late autumn, I get teary-eyed watching the transient beauty of their stalks as they twist into warped skeletal sculptures caught mid-dance with death.
Emblematic beauty. Whimsical impermanence. Mathematical perfection. A food-source for finches, a hitching post for bees. Whose heart isn’t moved by these silent stewards of the light, whose faces follow the sun?
I gathered them in vases and watched them begin to rot. I used them in my wedding bouquets, and doodled them in all my books. In my mind, I was constantly enlarging my mental map of all the places where I’d seen sunflowers growing — like an imaginary telegraph network connecting me to other kindred spirits across space and time. In my fantasies, a forest of them sprouted around my house, towering fifteen — twenty? — feet tall, and I passed into legend as the eccentric neighborhood “sunflower lady” that kids whispered about for years.
In a Sea of Sunflowers, watercolor and ink, 2017
And yet in both garden and paint, they eluded me. For years, I failed at growing them (while kindergarteners throughout America were sprouting them, easy peasy, in dixie cups) . And painting them — pfft! Green, yellow —such tricky colors. I felt I could never do them justice.
Until one day last year, when a tiny miracle showed up. After years of planting seeds that never took root, I found an unintended sunflower growing beneath my bird feeder! Planted there, no doubt, by a goldfinch messenger from above. (Oh, did I not tell you that the universe speaks to me in birds?)
So I took it as a sign (well, why not?) and began to paint.
“Specimen (Alexandra)”, watercolor, 2020
With my sloppy “I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing-but-I’m-doing-it-anyway” watercolor technique, I painted lots of them, from all sorts of angles and poses. Most ended up in the pile of “good learning exercises”. (Sometimes it takes 99 paintings to get that 100th nugget of gold). It kept me busy, engaged, and ready to wake up each day.
Of course I’m hardly alone. Many a soul has fallen under the spell of the sunflowers. And as I painted, I began to feel a very close connection to the other sunflower revelers of the world. Vincent Van Gogh (of course), but all the other artists, know and unknown, as well. (A particular favorite of mine is contemporary artist Helen Gotlib) I even felt connected to the finches and the bumblebees that rely on the plants for fuel.
Sunflowers kept “finding me”, showing up in the passages of the books I was reading. The quotes I found resonated with me as I worked in my studio. That summer I was re-reading some of Willa Cather’s novels, and it stood out to me that she, too, seemed to harbor a connection with sunflowers. (It seems no coincidence, in retrospect, since she is one of my favorite authors.
In “My Anotonia”, her narrator, Jim Burden, writes:
“All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me...sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuch's story, but I insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.” (emphasis my own)
And in “O, Pioneers!”, Cather vividly compares Alexandra Bergson — one of the first female book characters besides Scout Finch with whom, in my early days of reading, I could identify — to a sunflower.
“Alexandra herself has changed very little…She seems sunnier and more vigorous than she did as a young girl. But she still has the same calmness and deliberation of manner, the same clear eyes, and she still wears her hair in two braids wound round her head. It is so curly that fiery ends escape from the braids and make her head look like one of the big double sunflowers that fringe her vegetable garden.”
Reading this startled and grounded me, calling to mind the illustration I’d done of MYSELF as a prairie-loving sunflower several years before.
“Self Portrait as Sunflower”, ink and watercolor, 2017
Of course, I could go on forever about the extent of my obsession. I researched sunflowers constantly, and stayed up late looking at the treasure trove of artwork, photos, textiles, seed catalogs, and literature featuring their forms. I scoured the prairie, read books of poetry. I considered getting a tattoo. I learned about their cultural significance in other parts of the world — did you know that sunflower seeds were used to mark the official nuclear disarmament of Ukraine back in 1996? On that day, June 5, 1996, Jane Perlez of the New York Times wrote:
“Ukraine officially completed its nuclear disarmament today with a scattering of sunflower seeds by the top defense officials of the United States, Russia and Ukraine.”
“Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who has coaxed Ukraine's disarmament along by frequent visits here…said sunflowers instead of missiles in the soil would insure peace for future generations.”
“Under the terms of this agreement, Ukraine formally acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear-weapon state. In return, Washington pledged about $400 million to help dismantle the missiles and turn missile bases into areas for civilian use, like agriculture. The area at Pervomaisk, 180 miles south of Kiev, the capital, is being returned to wheat and sunflower fields.” (emphasis my own)
(How that all played out in world events thereafter, I cannot say. I use it merely as an example of humanity’s deep connection to flowers.)
Anyway…dear reader, are you still there? Are you, like me, wondering what my point is in all of this?
Simply put, I suppose it’s this:
That every moment of awe is a doorway to a world. It is the jumping off point for curious journeys and illuminating paths.
When wonder takes hold, adventure begins.
I heard an interview with a scientist one time (I’m sorry I forget her name and where I heard it!) and she said something that has stuck with me ever since:
“Artists are scientists who let their wonder hang out”.
Let your wonder hang out. Let it drip from your pockets and your sleeves.
