artdirector@sfreporter.com
Autumn in Santa Fe has a unique color palette: azure skies, purple asters, the golden hues of aspen leaves, chamisa and the brown-eyed susans that bloom by the highways. This year, autumn also brings with it a new picture book by Albuquerque-based author and artist Zahra Marwan.
In 2019, Marwan visited the Milwaukee Art Museum, which happened to be showing the works of Vincent van Gogh. Marwan couldn’t help but stop to admire their vibrant colors. Not usually one to read exhibit labels, she noticed one that described how Van Gogh had created his paintings of sunflowers to decorate the famous “Yellow House” where he lived and worked in Arles, France from 1888 to 1889—the house he shared briefly with his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin.
“He was alone, anticipating Gauguin’s arrival,” Marwan says of the time during which Van Gogh painted the sunflowers. “I don’t remember if I cried, but I do remember feeling deeply moved by how much we all think of each other, and the way we create spaces while alone in anticipation of one another.”
The idea stuck with Marwan, and when the 2020 pandemic lockdowns hit, the period of enforced isolation prompted her to return to that image of Van Gogh, alone, waiting for his friend’s arrival. From this seed blossomed a work focusing on a particular period of Van Gogh’s life: his 1888 move from Paris to Arles, where he hoped to found an artist’s colony. Marwan’s new book, The Sunflowers (Feiwel and Friends, Sept. 2024) illustrates the work Van Gogh created to decorate the Yellow House he and Gauguin would share for an intense two-month period and how his work evolved into the lush, vivid hues for which he would become best known.
The nonfiction picture book introduces young readers to Van Gogh’s life and work, and offers a meditation on friendship, care and finding the courage to pursue our own ideas of beauty even when others don’t see their value.
In Marwan’s book, Van Gogh’s move from Paris to Arles feels like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when black-and-white bursts into technicolor. She depicts his Paris days in muted, somber blues, grays and browns.
“Paris feels very blue,” she explains.
She writes about how the subjects Van Gogh was drawn to—including his sunflowers—were considered “inelegant” by his peers. In Arles, however, Van Gogh leaned into painting these inelegant things, and the book changes from muted colors to brilliant yellows; delicate greens, pinks and purples; with pervasive deep, melancholy blues that hint at the darker side of his story.
While researching the book, Marwan discovered Van Gogh sometimes liked a painting so much he made two—one for him to keep, and one for his friend.
“That’s so beautiful to me,” she says. “I love this idea that we can be alone yet we’re thinking about other people and feeling their absence.”
In The Sunflowers, art becomes a way to build community: as Van Gogh prepares the Yellow House for his friend, he imagines a future of living and working together.
Of course, the true story of Van Gogh’s life isn’t a happy one, making it a challenge to tell with a young audience in mind. Marwan says she considered ending the book on a dark note, but ultimately decided to focus on the solace Van Gogh found in his sunflower paintings and the optimism with which he established the home and studio in Arles, rather than his imminent descent into mental illness and suicide.
Marwan is no stranger to addressing heavy topics in children’s books. Her award-winning debut picture book, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky (Bloomsbury, 2022), tells the true story of her family’s immigration to the US from Kuwait, where they had been considered stateless and were subject to discrimination. For Marwan herself, The Sunflowers is a variation on a theme—while Van Gogh longed for the company of his friend in Arles, Marwan says, she relates to his experience in being separated from her family in Kuwait.
“I’m far away from my family,” she says. “I don’t have the right to live in Kuwait, so when I go back to visit it’s these intense periods of love and belonging, yet at the same time not really fitting in.”
In The Sunflowers, she describes a letter Van Gogh wrote to his younger brother, Theo, saying “I missed you the first few days, and it was strange for me not to find you when I came home in the afternoon.”
“I feel that feeling all the time, everywhere I go,” she says.
When she started work on The Sunflowers, Marwan thought the story was very different from Butterflies. But looking at it now, she realizes it’s almost the same story.
“It’s about someone missing someone,” she says. “In a lot of ways, it feels like a parallel story.”
The Sunflowers Reading and Signing: Noon Sunday, October 20. Hecho a Mano.129 W Palace Ave., (505) 455-6882
