Sunflowers - A journey

Sunflowers – a journey

I do lots of sunflower drawings and paintings. And no, it’s not because Van Gogh, or exactly because of Van Gogh?

My story with sunflowers started on one hot summer afternoon in 2018. For the first time after I became a mother, I got to be alone for a few days. My husband had taken the kids to the grandma in Limburg, and I stayed behind, planned a detailed mini holiday down to hours and quarter-hours, and was determined to make the best out of it. But then on the first day, I was hit with a heavy migraine, and had to abandon most of my plans. Yet on that afternoon, I decided I was going out anyway, to check up on the special exhibition at the Van Gogh museum I had booked weeks before. Since no one was expecting me to come home at a certain time, I decided to drop in for an open atelier workshop, painting some sunflowers.

Up till that moment, I hadn’t been doing any painting for years. The last memorable endeavor happened in high school. Then I decided I was not an artist and I held on to that belief for years, even though I was working in the art and cultural field as a journalist, met many artists, curators, museum directors, and saw many behind-the-scenes real artist life. To be honest, they all seemed unremarkably normal. Yet I believed artists were a special breed of people; whatever that was, it was not me. That afternoon, though, I stood before a blank piece of paper, fixed on the panel of a relatively giant easel with masking tape, and I gave myself permission to paint. Then there they were, two sunflowers appeared on my canvas, one standing in a glass vase and the other lying on the table, and they didn’t look bad at all.

I took home this little painting, displayed it in my hallway with poster gum, and for another year, I had done nothing other than pass by it without even noticing its existence. Only after I lost it forever due to some freaky accident did the desire to create finally start to burn brightly, like sunflowers.

To compensate, I was gifted with my first set of semi-professional acrylic paints and a bouquet of sunflowers. So I started to paint, draw too, the sunflowers; from the early blooming, the prime of the flowering, to the very withering end. I quickly came to understand why sunflowers were such good subjects for a poor artist like Van Gogh. They last a long time, and are interesting to look at in every stage of flowering; and they are effortlessly vibrant, full of life, even in the decay, they still hold their heads high, powerful, strong, though half rotten, a testament of perseverance and true elegance.  

That’s how it all started. The sunflowers.

When I just moved into my studio, my friend Vida came to visit and brought me a bouquet of sunflowers. She didn’t know about the story, but there couldn’t be a more suitable gift than that. I set them in a vase and started to paint again. All those paintings were done in one flowering cycle of the same sunflower bouquet. When the flowers finally rot to a degree that was impossible to hold them in the room, I stopped and realized how far I had gone from that summer afternoon in Van Gogh museum, when I first painted those two sunflowers, to here; and what a joy it had brought me, to paint, to create, to make art, to surrender to the beauty of the world.

Remember, remember, the sunflowers whisper to me, remember how that feels, remember what truly matters, remember the love, remember it all.