Inspired by dandelions

Clocks, sugars, cotton, wool. The silken parachutes of dandelions are a fixture of English summer gardens and childhood. 

The humble dandelion is regarded as a weed, though I dislike the term. A weed to me is not a nuisance, but a plant or flower that simply grows where it falls. It’s an opportunist, and dandelions are one of the very best, colonising driveways, fields, pavements and manicured gardens. With elegant draping leaves and long furry stalks, a dandelion is easy to spot amongst a carpet of low lying daisies. 

My son loves finding them everywhere and blowing the seeds far and wide

But just as weeds pop up where you might not expect them, so this humble yet beautiful plant crept its way into our family adventures, an Italian holiday and an art gallery before finding its way into my sketchbook.

On our recent forays into whatever landscape we can find, my son discovered the edible Maltese cape sorrel or Qarsu,  and developed a taste for this rather bitter green stalk. He started looking for this “snack” everywhere, and I was glad that my current obsession with flowers could provide Alfie with entertainment and sustenance. 

Of course, apart from foraging for snacks, I’d identify the few plants I could, pointing out their features and teaching him their life cycle. Somewhere among the scrubby garigue of Bugibba’s coastline, we discovered small patches of dandelions, and I showed him how to blow their clocks to send the seeds and their little parachutes in all directions, including into the fibres of your cardigan. He was instantly transfixed.

Baroque elegance and unlikely coincidences

Then came our Easter holiday to Modena, Italy, which was every bit as Baroque as I’d expected, but calmer, more dignified too. I didn’t expect to find huge swathes of greenery in the city - Italian squares don’t call for it , the Baroque places preferring an unrestricted view rather than blending in like a gothic spire behind a drooping beech tree.

Parco Giardino Ducale Estense, Modena

Elegant Cathedrals

Salvador Dali's Melting Clocks sculpture

Luckily for me there was a beautiful little park on route to the Enzo Ferrari museum, which had an abundance of daisies interspersed with their larger bullying neighbors, the dandelions. Every time my son saw one there was a shriek of excitement and a rush to pluck the stalks from the ground and rid them of their tiny parachutists. The air was filled with floating sugars and rhyming laughter.

What I did not expect though were for dandelions to follow us into the halls of the Palazzo dei Musei. Within this building was an ironically understated exhibition by Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali. The exhibition explored Dali’s obsessions with the psyche, dreams and the works of Sigmund Freud. The elegant collection of sculptures, lithographs and photos highlighted many of Dali’s most common themes and symbols, from the melting clocks to elephants on stilts and women with drawers emerging from their elongated bodies. 

Portraits from the exhibition Salvador Dalí "Arte e Psiche" in Modena

The emerging motif

Where are the dandelions, you ask? Well in the second exhibition room we were greeting by two exceptionally large black and white portraits of the artist himself with characteristic wild eyes, hard stare and twirled moustache, but more extraordinary was his caricature-like presence provocatively holding a dandelion. Now Dali does nothing without playfulness and meaning, so what did these extraordinary portraits mean? And of all the flowers, all the symbols we see everyday, what was it about the dandelion that made it stick in my mind and blossom as an emerging motif. 

The sketchbook studies

So it’s now found its way into the sketchbook planting the seeds of ideas. These “dandelion portraits” will elevate the mundane, turning what a lot of us see everyday and pay no attention to, into something elegant. Short of just pretty still life of flowers, I want these paintings to make you stop, just for a second and think, actually, that’s quite beautiful. The garden nuisance transformed into a Goldilocks.

I can’t wait to see where this seed of an idea ends up.