Who says that a sunflower has to be yellow? I will paint it any color which feels right to me. I have a red one in my garden anyway.

The Color of Sunflowers

What colors do you see when you look at a sunflowers? Be honest now. Are they all yellow? Well, maybe they all look yellow to most people, yellow on the outside and brown on the inside. If you look closely, though, you will notice that there is a great deal of variation in sunflower colors.

My Red Sunflower

In the spring, I sowed one package of large Russian sunflowers in my garden. Even though all the seeds came from the same package, not all flowers have the same color. Different pH of the soil is probably responsible for the variation. On the heavy alkaline clay soil the flowers are yellow and brown all right, but the seed which sprouted on the compost heap grew into red flowers with just a bit of a yellow around the outside, as you can see in the picture.

Looking with Your Heart

Now let me tell you what happened a few weeks ago in my first art class which I started taking on Wednesday evenings. The teacher gave me a huge piece of paper, 20 by 30 inches, and I was going to paint the first acrylic picture of my life. I normally paint in transparent watercolors, so this was a challenge for me.

I got inspired by a field of sunflowers on a calendar picture, so I thought that I would paint one huge sunflower, as huge as any which would later in the season grow in my garden.

First I created a really colorful background, blobbing patches of all my favorite colors onto the paper. I was just having fun. Never having used acrylics before, I needed to experiment. Then I proceeded to the red center of the sunflower, and the teacher wanted to know what kind of a melon I was painting.

My Sunflower

Well, this was no melon. My sunflower was not going to be brown anywhere, because I did not feel like it. My sunflower was going to compete in brilliance with the lifegiving sun, full of light, warmth, and energy.

Brown is fine for a sunflower to feed the birds, but not for a sunflower to brighten the wall on which I would eventually hang the picture.

This is my picture, my sunflower. Even if the sunflower I am painting looks yellow and brown, it does not feel that way to me. It feels yellow and red, and that is the way I am painting it.

Painting Your Feelings

When you are painting, never mind what your eyes tell you. Listen to your heart and paint what you feel. If the sunflower feels purple to you, then paint it purple. If it feels square to you, then paint if square. If if feels huge to you, then paint it huge.

It's your sunflower. Don't let anyone tell you what it feels like.

Vincent van Gogh painted many pictures of sunflowers, and each one looks different, because he felt differently each day he painted them. Here is one of those famous sunflower pictures.

Here It Is

Half a year after I started the painting, I still did not have a chance to finish "My Red Sunflower," but I got a chance to take a very poor quality photo of it with an old Polaroid camera, and here it is. The actual picture is quite stunning. Everyone who sees it for the first time just stares at it. Even I did when I saw it again after 5 months of it in storage, because I had forgotten what it looked like.

© Traute Klein, biogardener