Tactility and Sunflowers (1888) | CO

2

1

3

Have you ever felt the head of a sunflower before? The almost audible trill of disc florets against your fingertips? The difference of the gentle brush of the lush, delicate outer petals?

"Sight kindles in Apollo a desire that it alone ultimately cannot satisfy..." (p.312) "[A] play between the senses: the mutual gaze that has begun to be realized is the one instance in which sight actually matches the reciprocity inherent to the sense of touch." (p.312) "Yet vision is not merely a means for fixing on the object of desire; sight implies space (for just as touch does not admit distance, vision fails with contact)..." (p.317) "Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne" by Andrea Bolland

From the moment you lay eyes on this painting, you will invariably find yourself dreaming of what those sunflowers must feel like...the thick, impasto brushstrokes enticing you to feel an impossible texture that certainly must feel nothing at all like the heads and stalks of real sunflowers but nevertheless is just so impossibly compelling. The characteristic impasto employed by the masterful hand of Vincent van Gogh is perhaps one of the most brilliant examples of where tactility and art meet to produce a multi-sensory wonder. Much of the real texture of the sunflowers are still captured through this particularly unique method—the soft but jagged disc florets, the tender but stiff petals, the smooth but prickly stems—but the very technique with which this image was produced confers an entirely different sense of tactility to these objects that is neither entirely true to life nor entirely too far off.

"Big deal! So the artist lobs on a bunch of paint onto a canvas and I guess that I can kind of imagine how it feels...it's still just a painting of a bunch of sunflowers...what's the point?" Sure! All paintings are just a bunch of paint lobbed onto a canvas really...but try and dig just a little bit deeper for a second and try to find where your mind wanders when seeking meaning in this kind of composition. It's a still life—no?

"...draw attention to the power of the hand as the organ of touch that can be used in the pursuit of vice or virtue." (p.76) "What is depicted in this medieval drawing is not unlike the mythological fable of Hercules at the crossroads, except that here simple, mortal men must choose their path.Man's experience of the world, gained through his senses, enables him to deliberate and choose either the road to salvation (through the choice of the good and moral) or damnation (through the choice of the bad and immoral). For the men depicted along the journey of life, the rung of touch was the deciding factor in their prudent or imprudent use of the senses, and pivotal in whether they will follow the path of virtue or vice. Touch enables man to work or perform deeds that can bring him closer to God and salvation, but it also enables him to follow his libidinous and lustful tendencies, which lead him toward Hell." (pp.84-85) "The Ambivalence of the Sense of Touch in Early Modern Prints" by Sharon Assaf

While Vincent van Gogh isn't exactly using these sunflowers to convey a mobilizing or otherwise deeply troubling moral message, there is certainly still a certain "moral" element imbued in this image and enhanced by the visuo-tactile sensory engagement unique to this particular art style. Where many Early Modern depictions of the "five" main senses—most especially the sense of touch—were tied to specific moral worths through social, cultural, and religious contexts, there is no such explicit moral judgement or "grading" of the kind of sight and touch with which you engage in experiencing and interpreting this image. Vincent van Gogh hasn't exactly given you a personification of either of the senses or an explicit portrayal of the use of one or the either as particularly "bad" or particularly "good"...but he has still engaged in using sight and touch to convey a different kind of "moral" message—that of the fleetingness of life, beauty, and death.

Like how both Assaf and Bolland emphasized the inherent connection between sight and touch—where sight is almost used as a "verifier" of touch—you can see the flowers wilting but you can feel them dying. Through only visual stimuli, van Gogh is able to evoke a compelling visuo-tactile, multi-sensory experience through the exquisite texturing of paint and beautiful arrangement of shape, form, and color—transcending the two-dimensional limits of painting to reach out and touch you with a poignant reminder of life's beauty and tragic impermanence.

Sunflowers (1888) Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) Oil on Canvas 92.1 × 73 cm The National Gallery London, England

This particular style of painting refuses to accommodate passivity and "demands much participation from the audience" (McLuhan p.46) that forces a unique multi-sensory and cognitive engagement on the viewers' part that particularly serves to highlight what Bolland described as a unique reciprocal relationship between sight and touch. What you first see you are driven to touch. And although you can't exactly touch this painting—you can certainly imagine how it feels.

While Vincent van Gogh isn't exactly using these sunflowers to convey a mobilizing or otherwise deeply troubling moral message, there is certainly still a certain "moral" element imbued in this image and enhanced by the visuo-tactile sensory engagement unique to this particular art style. Where many Early Modern depictions of the "five" main senses—most especially the sense of touch—were tied to specific moral worths through social, cultural, and religious contexts, there is no such explicit moral "grading" of the kind of sight and touch with which you engage in experiencing and interpreting this image. Vincent van Gogh hasn't given you a personification of either of the senses or an explicit portrayal of the use of one or the either as particularly "bad" or particularly "good"...but he has still engaged in using sight and touch to convey a different kind of "moral" message—that of the fleetingness of life, beauty, and death.

Through the tactility of the artist's brushstrokes you can all the more potently feel the vitality of the sunflowers and the slow, gentle wilting of the once vibrant flowers that will inevitably fall and succumb to the natural progression of all life. These are cut flowers without the sun, with nowhere to turn their heads other than to each other or to the ground as the vibrancy you can see and the life that you can almost touch is slowly drained from petal to stem. The gradual transformation of the sunflowers from a vibrant bloom to a pitiful state of decay parallels the unattainability and transience of certain objects of desire (ex. recalling Bolland's analysis of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne) that painfully reminds us of a fraying tension between life, beauty, and death that are conveyed through the visuo-tactile qualities of a painted image.