har-ish

I was probably four or five when I first encountered a sunflower. Not in a garden, but in the pages of Chandamama, the Telugu children’s monthly that somehow found its way into my father’s bookshelves. I remember being fascinated by the flower, enough for my father, a biologist, to explain to me how sunflowers turn towards the sun and how their seeds eventually give us sunflower oil. It was one of those small childhood explanations that somehow stayed.

Years later, when I studied biology as an undergraduate, I encountered the proper name for that childhood wonder: positive heliotropism. The flower I had simply known as something that followed the sun suddenly acquired a scientific vocabulary.
And then there was Van Gogh, who took my fascination with sunflowers somewhere entirely different.

So this isn’t really an attempt to draw a sunflower as it exists in nature. It is an ode to the sunflower as I have carried it in my head since I was five: part childhood illustration, part biology lesson, part Van Gogh, and part memory.