Nostalgia in a Field of Wildflowers

 "Nostalgia looks toward what once was, not toward what could be. It promotes calm over change and solid stillness over fluid movement."


While nostalgia wasn't necessarily at the forefront of my mind while creating art this week, it definitely played a role. We have a field of wildflowers on a sunny day, captured in one happy, peaceful moment. I do think there is a sense of nostalgia to the image itself, regardless of the fact that it never actually took place.  The field is open and calm, the day bright and sunny. Really, it is an ideal place to exist, even if only for a short time.

And even if the image itself is fictional, there was also an element of nostalgia in its creation. It evoked a time from my childhood, trekking through a mountain field with my grandmother to document and identify various wildflowers. I even had a notebook that we’d gotten specifically for the purpose, complete with pictures of the flowers that we’d found, compared to a field book for identification. While this memory doesn’t really exist at the forefront of my mind much, it is something that I hold dear and miss doing. And the creation of this artwork brought me back there in a way, to the simple wonder that a sprawling field filled with flowers can bring. I almost wish that this image was real, that I had been there, to see this field of flowers and take part in this sunny day. 


And I was able to capture nostalgia in another way I think, through the use of texture to evoke a physical painting. I have an overlay of a canvas texture, as well as individual brush strokes I went back and added, much like in my works last week. Either way, intentional or not, I did capture a sort of nostalgia within this work.

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