Early Morning Sunflower 2017 | Gouache on paper | 10" x 7"

February 4, 2017

On July 4 last summer I woke up far earlier than I'd hoped to on that holiday morning. Lying there ruminating, as I am wont to do at times, I remembered a suggestion someone had recently made to me: that when I find myself in the throes of a spiraling brain spinning all my energy outward, to picture myself as a sunflower. To remember to include myself in the equation. Visualization is not something I do. It felt weird. But I was annoyed that I wasn't able to take advantage of the rare opportunity to sleep late, so up I rose.

For some reason I thought of when I was a child, how I'd lose myself in drawing. How I'd been able to just let go and enter a world of my own making, and how calming that was. I grabbed a box of watercolor pastels I'd bought for my kids, fancy crayons, if you will. Then I drew a sunflower. It was purposely simplistic, like the drawings I'd make as a child. A few details to get the idea across. Outlined shapes. Filled in areas of color. Line work. Then I made another, and then another. And I was surprised to find that the things I'd been ruminating on were gone from my head, and the shadow of them that was left there was lighter and more manageable. Pure visualization was not in me, but the act of physically rendering that image was actually doing the trick. Holy shit.

It wasn't like painting had become in art school for me, a chore, a joyless, over-thought act usually done in the middle of the night while stressing to complete a work before a deadline. It wasn't like the design work I'd been doing professionally for the past two decades, where conceptual strategy and effective productivity was as important as any creative aspect of the work. It was just... drawing a picture of a flower. Mindless. Easy. And it allowed my brain to gain control of the spiral. Instead of the sense of being bounced around chaotically, the spiral began to assume a pattern. The individual pieces that came together to form that pattern wove a story or reflected a thought or posed a question or pondered an idea. Since that day, the act of creating sunflower art has become integrated into my life. They take different forms, literal sunflowers depicting different moods, or imagery that in no way suggests a sunflower but uses the color palette I established on that first day to render a vortex, or a nebula, or a concept map. Or maybe something else.

It's the act of creating that body of work that's important, and not so much the subject matter or even the quality of the outcome. An act that has caused actual personal growth for me. Eight months ago I would have been skeptical of the idea. Eight months is a long time ago.

.  .  .

Check out my interview on the podcast Who Are These People? where I talk about my Sunflower paintings.

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