Glorious Sunflowers

In July the fields in Umbria and neighboring Tuscany are filled with glorious sunflowers.  Today I want to look at some images I have created featuring these beautiful flowers.

Glorious Sunflowers

Sunflowers As Exotic Flowers

I was born in Brighton in the UK and there sunflowers are considered something of an exotic flower. Some people grow really tall specimen sunflowers in their gardens. When in season, florists include them in their offer of special flowers. So the first time I saw fields of glorious sunflowers here in Italy it took my breath away.

Of course that was many years ago now when I first bought my house here in Umbria.  But I am still excited by the sunflowers as they come into bud and burst into bloom. There is a nice sequence as the fields bloom, there are a few fields that are always ahead of the others.

Sunflowers As Tourist Attractions

The glorious sunflower fields are tourist magnets. There is one place we pass often (on the way to the supermarket and our veterinary clinic so it is a regular thing). When the sunflowers first opened we joked about how long before the road is lined with cars and people furiously taking photographs of the flowers and their family hiding among them. Sure enough the very next day there were three cars and a number of people taking photographs and running around the edge of the field.

Sunflowers Are Crops

It is important to remember these are crops and an important part of the local economy. Beautiful though they are, they are grown for their oil, seeds and as animal feed. The animal feed is a byproduct of the oil production process. According to the National Sunflower Association, an American organisation, sunflower meal is the fourth largest oil seed meal produced and consumed in the world as livestock feed. Here in Italy, farmers tend to turn a blind eye to tourists (and photographers) mucking around on the edge of their fields. But the sunflowers are an important part of their livelihood.

Sunflowers As Art

Having illustrated the blog so far with some of my more straightforward sunflower images, here are some more experimental ones.

The first ‘Sunflower Triptych’ is an image I produced triptych-style, ie in three sections. I start the first panel with a straightforward picture of sunflowers that I have produced in a painterly style. Then the middle panel morphs that into a distorted, enlarged view of sunflowers. The third panel is an abstract using all of the colors from the main image and pulls the piece together.

The second of the more experimental images ‘Sunflower Montage’ involved creating a montage based on an image of a field of sunflowers. The aim here was to produce a ‘pretty’ version of a field of sunflowers. Not that a field of sunflowers isn’t pretty you understand, but I wanted to produce a softer image. And one that matched an earlier rose montage I produced called ‘Soft Rose Fragments’. I think it works well.

I hope you have enjoyed my little tour of sunflower images. You can buy fine art prints of my sunflower and other floral images from RedBubble (worldwide shipping) and Pictorem (free shipping in North America).

Before you go

My name is Dorothy Berry-Lound an artist and writer. You can find out more about my art and writing at https://dorothyberryloundart.com.

You can follow me on Facebook.

Thank you for reading!