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A friend and amazing painter from the Texas Hill Country asked how this painting came about, and I was startled to find that I didn’t know! I didn’t document the process very much at all, which is atypical — I photograph a work in progress regularly during the process in order to see it small, send to a laptop for notation, turn upside down, you name it.

But, on pieces like this, the triangles just take hold and I follow them.

So my apologies, Nancy, because I don’t know how illuminating this will be. I believe I sketched the sower figure several times, just pencil and paper, looking at both Millet’s painting and Van Gogh’s take on Millet’s painting. I wonder if the sower’s dramatic gesture is what lodged it in Van Gogh’s mind.

I decided to paint this in colors complementary to Millet’s colors, just for fun. I didn’t adhere closely to this because the painting has its own strong ideas.

Placement and size of the triangles has to do with following a form, or showing gradation in the sky or ground, and how to lead the eye around the canvas.

This painting is for sale, but I’m so attached to it!

"Kansas Girl," 2024, acrylic, 6 x 6. Collection of the Seabergs.

Some artists have a very strong idea of why they are making the art they are making. But I’ve interviewed many artists over the last 20 years, and most of them are simply humming along to the song in their head. More than a few artist’s statements are retrofit after the art is made.

This is not ingenuine. An artist may feel something not articulated, and make art that expresses the feeling. The feeling can point to a conviction, opinion, or musing that can be explored verbally. But a lot of times, the art comes first. From the gut or the heart, if you wish. I don’t know.

We buy sunflowers fairly often in this household. My wife likes them; she’s a Kansas girl. I like them, too, and we do live in Kansas now. Sunflowers are simple and sunny and beautiful.

But I find that when they die, they crumple and shrivel and gain a lot of character. I’ve seen a few artists paint dead flowers, and I’ve interviewed at least one about it…about 15 years ago. I didn’t want to paint them myself until this Fall.

So, to retrofit an artist’s statement for a short series of paintings featuring dead sunflowers, I’ll connect these paintings to the election. There was the death of a dream, the end of a pursuit of an office of power, and the end of a hope that a little less than half of America shared. Somehow, I wanted to find beauty in it. Am I admiring a declining empire? A disappearing dream or experiment in governance? My own naivete? I still don’t know. But something in the fragility and mortality of the sunflowers grabbed me. Here they are.

"Old Glory," 2024, acrylic, 17 1/2 x 19 1/2. Available.

"After the Fall," 2024, acrylic, 18 x 18. Available.

I wrote this article last year on how to responsibly paint en plein air. It is possible to love nature to death, if you are not careful. Please check out this PDF and let me know what you think.