The urgency of art, of making something beautiful - and inviting someone to love it.

Lessons from a field of sunflowers

Every year, in the town where I live, as August comes to its hot, stuttering end, a field of sunflower blooms. Through late summer, the flowers stand tall and strong, their yellow faces tilted to the sun, as children run between their thick, fuzzy stalks.

You might expected to find this field of flowers on the outskirts of a quaint new England village or lost deep in the countryside. But no. You’ll find these rows of sunflowers and their bright, happy faces, planted by a visionary young farmer on a disused piece of land, just outside the city, behind a bunch of chain stores like TJ Max and Buffalo Wild Wings. You can see the dome of the capitol building glinting in the distance and power lines criss crossing in front of it. You can hear the highway rumbling by. If you like, you can take a small rickety yellow school bus along the interstate to get there. But this is what makes it so special: this giddily generous gift of luminous yellow flowers in the most unexpected of places.

As I walked through the flowers with my children, last summer, it reminded me about the work we do as artists and why it matters.

Looking at those flowers I understood that art, at its most essential, is just this: making something beautiful and inviting someone to like it - maybe even, to love it.

Whatever side of the political spectrum you find yourself on, I doubt you’ve escaped the general feelings of anxiety and despondence about the state of the world. The wild fires and the floods and hurricanes. The poverty and inequality and disease. The wars. The broken healthcare systems. The political instability. Perhaps worst of all, the polarisation, which has made us lose our trust in our shared humanity. We and the world are out of sorts. And at these times, it feels like only one thing can break through: the beauty of art, perhaps especially when it catches us by surprise - and remind us of our inextricable togetherness.

And the magic of art, of course, is that it heals not just the recipient but also the maker because there is no real separation between the two. Art is a beautiful dance of connection.

There is something tremendously brave about making art. How you put your whole self into it - your heart and guts and soul. The gamble you take, putting hours, weeks, months and often years into a project that might fall apart or be rejected and never see the light of day. That, coupled with reality that very little of the art we make will give us enough to live on. The fragile faith that the sunflower you’ve planted will be hardy enough to grow through the hard, dry earth and maybe, just maybe, be seen by one person and help them smile or breathe a little easier.

I feel moved to tears, sometimes, when I watch people around me making things. You can find quite a few of these magical creatures in the café where I write. An artist hunched over his sketchpad drawing graphic novels for children filled with brave, colourful creatures, part animal, part human. A seasonal worker who barely scrapes a living but writes poetry every day and, once month, comes to read it aloud. The group of knitters who push the tables together once a week, their conversations weaving in and out of their trailing yarn. The posters on the windows advertising local theatre, where people work for months to put together a story on stage to delight us.

Making art is an act of faith. But what an important act of faith it is. An act of faith that might just save us.

In a world fractured by isolation, loneliness, polarisation, disconnection, art holds out the tentative hand of friendship and love and community: through the gift of your art, you’re saying, ‘Here, I made this for you. I don’t really know you but I hope you like it.’ What a generous and audaciously brave and beautiful way to live. And how necessary, too.

Art is always generative. It brings people together and in that coming together it provides an incubator for new ideas, for new art, for connection. The sunflowers bring the bees back to my home town. The little sunflower festival makes space for other vendors and craftspeople, like the lady who makes her own loose leaf tea from native flowers, from whom my daughter and I bought a bag of tea-leaves called The Annabel Blues, which we now brew and sip together at bedtime.

In the fall, when they fade, the sunflowers are harvested and pressed for oil, so delicious you can eat it off a spoon and taste the summer sun. The oil is offered up to nourish the community and to pay for the following year’s crop of sunflowers. Every part of the process is a gift.

There’s also something about this harvesting and beginning again, every year, that feels like an important lesson for an artist. The work is never done. We always begin again. And that, too, is part of the beauty. The commitment to showing up, to planting those seeds in that soil, over and over.

Being an artist is often seen as a frivolous occupation. When the world is burning, what does it help to sit and write a poem or draw a picture or compose as song - or indeed plant a field of sunflowers? I’m sure that artists, everywhere, are plagued by this thought. Wouldn’t it be better if we retrained as doctors or scientists or computer programmers?

But that is missing the point of our humanity, the wiring of our souls, which needs beauty, in any form, through nature, through words and pictures and dance and music, through story, as much as it does food and water and clothes and shelter.

I might even be so brave as to suggest that these are things that matter most, when the ground under our feet is shifting. When we’re suffering, we need to feel connection, love, the balm of seeing something beautiful, made by another human, to give us hope. I have been saved, more than once, by a small act of beauty - a poem, a song, a chapter from a novel, a drawing by one of my children - on a day when I felt as though I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other.

So to my artist friends, keep the faith. Keep making beautiful things. They matter. And for those of you who don’t see yourself as artists, or full time artists or even part time artists, remember that we can all make something beautiful and offer it up as a gift, and in that way, we are all artists. Your smile is a work of art. So is a hug. So is a flower your plant in your front yard. Or a piece of trash you pick up. Or a door you hold open. Or a kind word you extend. Or meal you put on the table. Or a story you read to your children at night. Or a cup of coffee with a heart swirled into the milk that you make for a lonely writer sitting in a café. Make art with your life in the most unexpected of places.

Some of us have a special calling to make art. But for all of us, our lives are art. And art, by its nature, is generous and open hearted and is, perhaps, the very best medicine in a fractured world.

With love, and keep going, my friends - it matters, more than you will ever know.

Virginia 🤍

Writing prompt

For 10 minutes, write non stop in answer to the prompt:

“Today, I saw something beautiful…”

You could write a long list, or go into detail about one thing. You could write about something mundane or silly or something very serious and personal. Be open to what comes to you and chase away and sense of embarrassment or inferiority or judgement. The perception of beauty is a very personal thing. It’s often rich with emotion and ideas. It’s good to get it out onto the page and to see what shape it takes. And sometimes, the smallest things in the world are the most magnificent - you can write about sunsets but think about finding beauty in the unexpected too.

A Quotation to Chew Over

I was reminded, recently, of one of my favourite words by the novelist, Doris Lessing, which feels particularly apt in these times and which reminds us that we just need to get on with it - the time is never right.

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

―Doris Lessing

If you enjoyed this newsletter, it would mean the world to me if you could hit the heart button. I know that all this liking business can be tedious, but what hitting that heart does, in practical terms, is make our work more widely visible and available to other writers. So if you could take a second to do that, I’d be super grateful. If you feel like re-stacking or sharing, that would be the icing on the cake!

Virginia Macgregor is the author of five novels for adults and two for young adults. She has an MFA in Creative Writing with a specialisation in the teaching of writing. She lives with her husband, her three children, her four cats and a home full of books and coffee mugs, in New Hampshire. She can often be found writing at her In Real Life bookstore café in her local town.