Oil on canvas
2024

In summer 2024, I visited a sunflower farm with my wife, to wander through the field of head-high sunflowers and feel for a moment like we were delightfully lost in nature.

Even though my childhood was spent in rural Yorkshire, the farmers around my childhood home were more inclined to growing potatoes than sunflowers, so still the experience was quite unique.

This painting uses one of my many photos from that day as it’s reference. The painting was created during my weekly oil painting classes.

Beginning with an underpainting of blue, and using a modified ‘big shapes method’ the painting grew in shades of viridian green mixed in part with yellow ochre. Dotted between the field of green, the sunflower heads offer a warm stopping point of yellow ochre and cadmium yellow that lead the eye up into the farmhouse in the distance.