Over the years I have come back to photographing and writing about sunflowers, just as practically every painter I’ve encountered has included them in their work. I’ve linked them to Blake’s poetry and described the history of their distribution across the world, religious twists included. What is it that draws us to them? Their saturated-color beauty when viewed en masse, their wondrous patterns when viewed in isolation, their ability to signal full, brilliant life as well as elegant decay?

I was thinking of that when encountering a sunflower maze on Sauvies Island last week, your’s to explore if you are willing to enter a farm store and pay $5 for the pleasure. I declined – still staying out of stores, even when wearing a mask and fully vaccinated – and proceeded to just walk around the perimeters.

Some of today’s photographs are from that occasion, others I’ve gathered over time. They were chosen with a focus on pattern, something photography is singularly able to capture when reduced to black & white, in contrast to the magic worked by painters with colors and looser depictions. I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the two – color and pattern – and also remind ourselves that there are interesting sunflower paintings beyond Van Gogh (and even for him some that are lesser known but just as fascinating.)

Let’s start with the Dutch, then, and marvel at the use of color that captures the radiance of these flowers.

Abraham Brueghel added the flower almost like an after thought in the background of the painting.

His landsman a few centuries later became famous for his favorite subject.

My preferred of his depictions, however, is this, so fluid and alive even with hints of decay, like little suns floating on water.

Paul Gauguin was drawn to the subject as well, but this portrait of his friend Van Gogh is probably one more familiar to viewers than his still-life.

This was the caption from the van Gogh museum site:

Was Van Gogh really painting a vase of sunflowers when his friend Gauguin produced this portrait of him? No, he can’t have been: it was December and far too late in the year for sunflowers. But it’s quite probable that Van Gogh painted a copy of one of his own sunflower pictures around this time. The landscape in the background is also fictional: unlike Van Gogh, Gauguin liked to work from his imagination. They often argued about this. This painting refers to their disagreement. 

Later, Van Gogh wrote about this portrait: ‘My face has lit up a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then.’

Diego Rivera, on the other hand, painted sunflowers that are said to reference the style of the greats before him, with, some speculate, a bit of irony. Tahitian beauty with the flower of the Americas?

A spoof of the Impressionist’s short vibrant brush strokes, vividly displayed behind the girl in the painting?

My favorite of his are these sunflowers that seem to provide a shelter, and also act like interested on-lookers, fascinated by the fate of that poor dismembered doll.

They are certainly supportive of humankind in many ways. Their seeds are edible and they are rich in vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron and protein. They also act as decontaminators of toxic soil. Sunflowers are so called hyperaccumulators of dangerous heavy metals, extracting in particular radioactive metals, like cesium-137 and strontium-90 from the soil into their stem, leaves and flower head. Sunflower fields have become one way of trying to clean up the results of nuclear disasters, from Chernobyl to Fukushima (although, in the latter case, the wrong species of sunflower was planted, absorbing much less than desired. Pollute and learn.) When the sunflowers in the radiation areas are grown up and before birds become radioactive by eating the seeds, they are harvested and safely disposed of through pyrolysis. This process burns off all of the organic carbon in the plant while leaving the radioactive metals behind. These metals are then vitrified into pyrex glass and stored in a shielded container underground. No wonder the nuclear disarmament movement chose the sunflower as its symbol.

They also absorb some of the most common metal pollutants on our planet, such as cadmium, nickel, zinc, and lead, and so are used these days to clean up industrial pollution sites across the U.S., helping to considerably lower the cost of cleaning toxic soil.

On to the post- impressionists. Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt become more stylized, with a flowery pattern dominating the painting and the configuration foreshadowing his famous “The Kiss.”

Egon Schiele returned to the plant over and over again, with most renditions expressing his familiar tendency towards the morbid. This one is still lovely.

Moving on, there is David Hockney. Not to my taste, but I was amused to learn what other, more educated critics saw in it.

What you don’t see in the interiors you see in the fields: young sunflowers are heliotropic, their heads move with the sun so that they expose themselves to maximum light and warmth which attracts pollinators necessary for reproduction. Ever wondered how they do this, since they don’t have muscles to move their heads? It’s actually an amazing process. Put into simplified terms, their stems grow both at night and during the day. But at night the west side of the stem grows much faster making the head flop eastward in the morning. During the day the opposite is true: the east side of the stem grows more so that by dusk the sunflower head turns westward catching the last of the warming rays. When they are fully grown they end in an eastward looking position to be ready for the sun at earliest possible time. How on earth does nature come up with these tricks????

My favorite still-life for last: Piet Mondrian, who else.

Nature’s soothing greens brought inside, the sun’s light seemingly caught and distributed by the flower head, for a soft, shiny day. Wishing us all one of those.

Music today is from Russia. 17th century Tsar, Peter the Great, introduced the sunflower to this country. Suddenly an oil-rich plant, formerly unknown to the Russian Orthodox church, was available to skirt the restrictions assigned to Lent, the season of fasting. The primary rule was to give up sources of fat, both animal and vegetable, with precise designation of exactly which fat rich foods were forbidden. Farmers everywhere began to grow the sunflower since its oils and seed, not on that list, were soon highly coveted during these lean times.