Sunflowers, 11/2005

I found a photo of my sisters and me sitting in our backyard under a 12 foot sunflower. It was so tall that it couldn’t fit in this photo so I had to use another picture of the flower itself as a reference for this painting. That sunflower brought back good memories. I can remember looking up toward the sky seeing the bright yellow petals so long and soft with the middle part that held all of those seeds. It brightened my days wherever I sat near it, as if it was smiling down on me. It was so big that it finally broke off of the stalk. On the ground, the flower was so heavy I couldn’t even lift it. In the painting the only shape I recognized was part of the sunflower shape at the top right corner. The rest of the shapes are our features, which I can’t make out. So much is going on in this painting beyond what I see. The energies of the three of us came out through my brush. As I painted, I thought of my relationships with my sisters, one was two years older than me, the other seven years younger. I was the middle daughter. These obscure paintings were lifting so much out of me. It was hard to put into words what was happening within my psyche. But I knew that I found a wonderful painting process, a healing or replenishing of misconceptions about myself and my sisters. Molding and blurring our energies with golds, blues, and brown metallic paints, then softening the edges with powdery pastels was definitely working some magic on me. I couldn’t wait to get started on the next one.