The Sunflower Poster, and What Happened When I Tried to Paint It Again
There's a question I get about oil painting that I never have a good answer to: Why that subject?
For most of what I do, the bison studies, the cowgirl portraits, the Western figures, I can usually trace it back to something specific. A reference image that hit right. A memory. A shape I wanted to understand.
The sunflowers are harder to explain.
I painted my first vase of sunflowers a couple years ago, half on impulse. I'd been doing a lot of figure work, a lot of dark ochres and burnt siennas, and something about the whole exercise felt like it needed a reset. Sunflowers are loud. They're almost aggressively yellow. And yellow is genuinely one of the more difficult colors to paint — if you push it too warm it looks flat, too cool and it goes chartreuse on you. I wanted that fight.
The painting that came out of it, just called Sunflowers, ended up looser than I planned. More impressionistic. The kind of thing where the brushwork matters as much as the subject. Up close you're just seeing marks; you have to step back before it resolves into a flower. I actually liked that about it. It felt honest about what a painting is.
When I made a fine art reproduction poster from it, I wasn't sure what to expect. Prints can lose that quality — the texture reads differently, the layering flattens. But the contrast on this one, that deep chocolate-brown behind the yellow petals, held. It prints dark and rich in a way that keeps the painting's weight.
Why There's a Second One
A while later I came back to the subject. Not because the first one was unsatisfying, more because I felt like I hadn't solved it yet. Oil painting works that way sometimes — you think you're done with something and then three months later you're staring at your reference again.
Sunflowers No. 2 is 12×16", oil on canvas, and it's tighter in some ways, more deliberate. The first one was about looseness; this one was about getting the bloom right — that central structure of a sunflower head, the way the disc florets sit in the middle and the ray petals radiate out from them. There's more weight to the dark center in No. 2. More contrast between that and the gold.
The tonal range is wider. It photographs better. I don't know if it's the better painting — that's not really for me to say — but it's a different painting, and it wanted to exist.
Both are available as fine art reproduction posters, unframed and framed. The paper is Japanese archival stock, 189 g/m², matte finish. The framed version comes in black, red oak, or white Ayous wood, with an acrylite front protector.
Where These Actually Hang
A lot of the Western stuff, the bison, the riders, the portraits, people tend to hang in offices, studies, the kinds of rooms where you want something with some grit to it. Sunflowers land differently. I see them in kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms. They're warm without being precious about it. That was the goal, anyway.
If you're looking for a sunflower poster that doesn't look like clip art, something with actual brushwork underneath it, this is what I make. California light through an oil painter's eye.
You can find the Sunflowers fine art print here and Sunflowers No. 2 here. Framed versions are linked on the same pages.