van gogh-inspired sunflowers

As I mentioned in my last post, we finished up our two-week unit study on All Things French by painting some Van Gogh-inspired sunflowers. I have a larger purpose for the white signs I painted them on - I want to add a little personality and beauty to our homestead here. Sunflowers seemed the perfect choice.

We began growing sunflowers here two years ago and were pleased (and surprised) to find that they thrived on our land with very little effort on our part. How wonderful when we also found out that sunflowers have the rare ability to "cleanse" your land by leaching out the chemicals used by the conventional farmers before you. Now we probably aren't going to want to eat those seeds for a few years, but what an amazing function those beautiful plants provide! Plus, nothing says happy sunshiney sunshine to me like a giant bright yellow sunflower as it lifts its head up to the sky and follows the sun on its westerly path through the day.

I've been looking forward to painting the sunflowers since we started our France study. I don't bring out the paints very often. Okay, we paint next to never. I can easily count our painting sessions at home on one hand. Why do we not do this basic art activity? The mess.

I am pretty relaxed in general about art and what creations the girls come up with. I don't critique it. I encourage them to draw and cut and glue and even tape sometimes (when we have it around! somehow it disappears as fast as Band-aids around here). Creativity is king here, not technique or even talent. Just try. That's what I want to see. Try and try and try again, because I didn't try. I was critiqued somewhere along the line, and so I censored myself, and then I quit trying. You can only freely stretch yourself in one frame of mind, and that is without censorship. I feel like once you internalize the critiques of experts and authority, then you self-censor every piece and that chance for free creative license and learning in the middle of the moment disappears.

But paint? Painting inside my home cannot be free by its very nature. It makes me Type A edgy during the whole activity. What are you doing? Keep it on the paper! Dang it, child, that is going to permanently stain!! Yeah, I am not fun to paint with.

So I was excited about the sunflowers because it's been a loooong time since Sassy and I have painted together, and because I rarely do anything artistic just for the sake of doing it. How fun to try to copy and learn from Van Gogh's style! How unlike anything we ever do!

Well, the results were more than I'd hoped for. We had fun and there was very little mess. Sassy has grown so much since we last tried that she was no problem at all. The babies slept through most of it, but Livvy did wake up when I was on my third flower and I had to paint one-handed for most of that one and some of the last flower. That was difficult, but interesting too how it changed things.

I went off this Van Gogh painting of a close-up sunflower.

As I was painting, I realized how my garden wisdom was helping my painting. I know exactly how the petals of the flower meet the seed head in the middle. I've studied it dozens of times over in my own garden. I know how the seeds in the head are arranged. I know how the sunflower seems to lift its head up to the sun, like a seeker. As I painted, I could almost see my flowers, almost be in my garden.

One of the petals in Van Gogh's painting had a mind of its own. A little wisp out to the side, a petal with flair. Maybe the wind was catching it; maybe it knew it was beautiful and was flaunting it. I wanted my petals to have flair. I want my garden to have flair. My hand wisped the petals out to the side. My hand was the wind, a wispy wind.

I would think that painting your garden, closely, the flowers and plants in your own garden, would make for more beautiful paintings and a more beautiful garden. The close and intimate knowledge you would develop for your garden would shine in your paintings and the process of studying and focusing while you paint would help you build an intuitive understanding of your garden space.

Something about painting is meditative, I found. Who knew? Ha! How I wish I hadn't been so critiqued and censored when I was young. Such focused meditation on a particular subject could surely bring about the mindfulness of being and universal wisdom that helps the immature grow up. Or that helps the self to sacrifice to something (and eventually someone) else. Or that helps the seeker find the ultimate Creator.

I wonder if my second-grade art teacher helped me screw up my life during all of my twenties. Haha! I'm joking, of course. First off, I don't even remember my second-grade art teacher so I have no idea when I was critiqued to the point of making me embarrassed to try. Also, I am wholly responsible for my own life.

But what I won't do is rob my children of a viable avenue for their own artistic, emotional, and especially spiritual growth.

They must try, try hard, try with all their feeling, try with all their senses, without bothering to ask me what I think of it. And the number one rule when putting pen or pencil or brush to paper is this: slow down, look closely, be still.

The gift of it all is in the process. Learning this is the greatest lesson of all.