Week 1
Discussion
About Sunflowers
Related to daisies, there are about 70 species of sunflowers (L. helianthus). There are both annual and perennial varieties. Most are native to North and Central America; the remaining three originated in South America. They began to be exported to other parts of the world in the 16th century and are now widespread including in Japan where sunflowers are called himawari.
Sunflowers were first cultivated in Mexico and the southeastern part of the U.S. 3,000 to 5,000 thousand years ago for their eatable seeds, and they are major commercial crops today for seeds and vegetable oil. Rich in unsaturated fatty acids, sunflowers are among the four most harvested plants for oil along with rape seed, oil palm, and soya. Parts of sunflower plants not used for seeds and oil is rendered into animal feed.
Varieties of sunflowers with seeds rich in oil have small black seeds with thin hulls
This is the flower head for Black Peredovik sunflowers, a rich source for oil.
What appear to be flower petals around the outer rim of the blossom are actually specialized leaves.
The best varieties for eatable seeds have large striped seeds with thick hulls.
This is the core of a young sunflower blossom that will yield seeds for eating.
Note the spiral pattern. Not all varieties have this. Mathematicians have determined that it is related to the Finocchi sequence, a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the previous two numbers in the sequence (e.g. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.).
Flower viewing is a popular recreational activity in Japan. The picture below is of a himawari field containing over 1.5 million sunflowers at the Nanko Sunflower Festival in Hyōgo Prefecture. The festival is generally held in July and August, but the exact dates depend on when the plants are expected to bloom in any given year.
The idea that sunflowers turn their blossoms to follow the sun is only partly true. Budded plants do this, but the behavior ceases shortly after the flowers emerge. Sunflowers generally stop turning when facing in an easterly direction. That is why sunflower fields often look like the blossoms are all facing in the same direction.
Sunflowers are sometimes used in ikebana arrangements.
A western artist famous (among other things) for his sunflower paintings is Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890). The painting below (1889) is one of his most famous, painted when he lived at Arles in the south of France.
The color yellow meant cheerfulness to Van Gogh, and this sunflower painting was done in a rare period of happiness for him. Van Gogh was strongly impressed with Japanese ukiyo-e prints and possessed hundreds of them. Their influence can be seen in many of his works.
A Japanese artist who painted a sunflower picture was Shibata Zeshin (1807 - 1891). Zeshin has been called "Japan's greatest lacquerer." The Japanese word for lacquer painting is maki-e. It literally means a sprinkled picture or design. It is a technique "in which pictures, patterns, and letters are drawn with lacquer on the surface of lacquerware, and then metal powder such as gold or silver is sprinkled and fixed on the surface of the lacquerware." (From the Wikipedia article.) The maki-e painting of Mt. Fuji (1872) below is one of Zenshin's masterpieces.
Zeshin was proficient in a number of other media besides maki-e. An ukiyo-e of his, Sunflower and Grasshopper (1877) is shown below.
After Japan opened up to the west in 1853, Japanese artists, impressed with western art, largely abandoned traditional Japanese art forms for Western-style techniques. Eventually, though, artists longing for a return to traditional ways formed the Shin-Hanga movement early in the 20th century. Shin-Hanga was specifically focused on bringing back ukiyo-e style woodblock prints. Imao Keinen (1845-1924) was a prominent part of that movement. A sunflower print of his is shown below.
