Unquiet
Things

In the hazy heat of late summer, when the sky feels too vast and the cicada’s ceaseless shriek all but deafening, I turn to Charles Burchfield’s sunflowers.  These are not the cheery picture-perfect rows that grace so many cottage-core garden beds or the charming yellow bouquets of Mary Englebreit greeting cards.  No, Burchfield’s sunflowers throb with an eerie vitality, their petals seeming to vibrate with unseen energies, their stems twisting like dancers caught in the ecstatic trance of an errant breeze.

Born in 1893 in Salem, Ohio, Burchfield spent much of his life in Buffalo, New York, a city of harsh winters and industrial grit. There, he found endless inspiration in this interplay of nature and industry, magic in telephone wires humming with unseen messages and in the steadfast sunflowers that refused to be cowed by concrete or steel. They are nature’s rebels, refusing to be contained or cultivated. This visionary American painter found in sunflowers a kindred spirit – proud, resilient, and slightly otherworldly.

Burchfield’s unique style, often described as a form of mystical realism, combined precise observation with a visionary approach. His technique involved layering watercolors to create luminous, vibrating effects that seemed to capture not just the physical appearance of his subjects, but their inner energies as well. This approach is particularly evident in his sunflower paintings, where each petal pulses with an inner light.

Burchfield knew sunflowers. He really knew them in that bone-deep way that comes from countless hours of patient observation.

In his journal, he wrote:

“The sunflower turns its face to follow the sun, but what of its nighttime dreams? Does it yearn for dawn even as dusk falls?”

I wonder this, too, gazing at his paintings.

And it’s not just Charles Burchfield and me. Sunflowers have long occupied a place of reverence in human culture. Native American tribes used sunflower seeds not just for food, but in their healing rituals. In the language of flowers, sunflowers represent adoration and loyalty, their steadfast faces ever turning to follow the sun’s journey across the sky. Did you know the Incas saw gods in sunflowers? I can almost understand why, looking at Burchfield’s work. There’s something ancient there that speaks of long summers and longer winters, of cycles that spin far beyond our brief lives.

This unwavering devotion to light and time inspired the poet William Blake to pen these lines:

“Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done.”

Weary of time. Yes, that’s it exactly. Blake’s words resonate deeply with Burchfield’s visual explorations of sunflowers. In Burchfield’s paintings, these flowers aren’t caught in a single moment but seem to exist in all moments at once – bud, bloom, and withering seed head in one impossible, beautiful form. His technique of layering watercolors and using bold, rhythmic brushstrokes create a sense of movement and transformation as if we’re witnessing the entire life cycle of the sunflower in a single glance.

Burchfield wrote in his journal, with a mixture of awe and kinship:

“Today, I stood before a stand of sunflowers, and for a moment, I swear I could hear them singing. Not with voices but with the very vibration of their being. It was a song of summer’s zenith, of life lived boldly and without regret.”

Oh, to have ears that could hear such songs! To see the world as Burchfield saw it, thrumming with hidden rhythms and secret symphonies. His sunflowers invite us to try, look closer, and listen harder. This ability to tune into the secret frequencies of nature draws me to Burchfield’s work and sets it apart. The weird lights and shadows of his strange singing sunflowers remind us that even in the most familiar of garden plants, there lurk ancient mysteries and untamed magics. In their strange, vibrant forms, we see echoes of every summer past and the promise of summers yet to come.

If you seek to steep yourself in the essence of Burchfield’s sunflowers, to feel the thrum of their secret energies, consider exploring works that share their spirit.  Dive into the pages of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” or Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, where nature’s mystery bleeds into terror and wonder. Let the haunting melodies of Joanna Newsom’s Ys or Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill wash over you, evoking landscapes both familiar and utterly alien.

Lose yourself in the shadowed forests of The VVitch or the sun-drenched, unsettling vistas of Picnic at Hanging Rock. For a more psychedelic journey into nature’s mysteries, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England offers a hallucinatory exploration of an English Civil War battlefield that feels spiritually akin to Burchfield’s vibrating landscapes. The eerie folk horror of  The Wicker Man(1973) and the cosmic dread of The Lighthouse also tap into that sense of nature as an overwhelming, often hostile force. The invasive, untethered reality of the endless reeds in Onibaba feels like a dream, like folktales or mythology.

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Mary Oliver’s nature poetry captures a similar sense of wonder and reverence in the natural world. J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine offers an intense, almost hallucinatory immersion in the English countryside that echoes Burchfield’s vibrant landscapes. Robert Macfarlane’s  The Old Ways explores ancient paths and landscapes with a keen eye for the mystical and the uncanny, resonating with Burchfield’s ability to reveal the hidden energies of the natural world.

Musically, you might also explore the atmospheric landscapes of Sigur Rós, whose ethereal soundscapes evoke the vast, unearthly beauty of their native Iceland. The transcendent folk of Current 93 delves into mystical and sometimes unsettling territory, much like Burchfield’s more intense works. Consider too the haunting Appalachian-inspired ballads of Gillian Welch, the spectral ambient works of William Basinski, or the nature-infused neo-folk of Hexvessel. Each of these artists, in their own way, captures something of the mystery, beauty, and occasional menace that Burchfield found in his sunflowers and landscapes. I’ve got a little playlist here, not so much sunflower-inspired, but more just Burchfield vibes in general: Sphinx & Milky Way.

These works, like Burchfield’s paintings, tap into nature’s hidden histories and the uncanny lurking in the everyday. They evoke moods of wistful contemplation and eerie beauty, revealing a deep, sometimes uneasy connection to landscape and seasons. In their own ways, they whisper of a world alive and conscious, often indifferent or even hostile to human concerns – much like the vibrating, almost sentient plant life in Burchfield’s most intense works. Through these various mediums, we can approach that sense of an animated, mysterious natural world beyond human understanding, inviting us to look closer, listen harder, and perhaps, for a moment, hear the secret songs of sunflowers.