Sunflower
A bright yellow sunflower is set against a plain white-blue background in this oil painting by Nan Youngman. Its cheerful mood corroborates the joyful love of life described about the artist. Sunflower (1970) was made following the artist’s move to the Fens in Cambridgeshire in the mid-1960s. During this period she began to focus on singular items or features of the landscape. The decision to depict objects out of their usual place was inspired by English surrealists who, ‘in the interwar period, created a sense of the uncanny through unexpected juxtapositions of objects, or by buildings and objects situated out of place in the landscape’.