-Black Hole Sunflower-

Year:

2021

18 × 24 in · Acrylic & Spray Paint on Gallery-Wrapped Canvas

At some point I realized that just about every painter seems to take a crack at painting flowers. So I said "fuck it, let me give it a go".

Black Hole Sunflower was my version of that. Unlike a lot of my work, this one was pretty deliberately mapped out beforehand. I knew I wanted the black sunflower as the focus, this strange sun hanging in the background, and a loud, unconventional sky surrounding everything. I wasn't interested in making a traditional flower painting. I wanted mine to be proudly eccentric.

I was still searching for my visual voice in the early days, and looking back, those were some of the fun days—the discovery days. I was playing with figurative imagery and figuring out how far I could push familiar things before they became something else. That sky in particular became an early example of something I'd continue doing later: using completely unconventional colors to represent things we already know.

The title didn't come until after the painting was finished. I'm a huge fan of Soundgarden's *Black Hole Sun*, and once I stepped back and looked at this black sunflower against that trippy sky, the song basically shouted at me. I hadn't consciously painted the song, but considering how permanently it lives in my head, maybe there's a little chicken-and-the-egg situation here.

Either way, *Black Hole Sun* met my sunflower. And Black Hole Sunflower was born.

Original, one of one artwork
18 × 24 inches
Acrylic & spray paint
Gallery-wrapped canvas
Ready to hang

$575 · Available

Complimentary shipping within the continental U.S.

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