Petal by Petal

Instruments & studies · Independent project · 2024

Five sunflowers unfold the temporal and thematic anatomy of 663 letters Van Gogh wrote to Theo. Biographical data becomes a living botanical form rather than a conventional chart.

What distinguishes this piece is that metaphor is not applied after the fact; form itself becomes the measuring instrument. Petal count encodes age, disk area letter volume, stem width thematic intensity, while flow ribbons bind five years into one narrative field. Multivariate data remains legible without surrendering its poetry.

Five years, five sunflowers

The main visual combines age, letter count, topic intensity, and topic flow in one botanical grammar.

When form becomes an instrument

The reading key assigns every botanical element to a quantitative channel, bringing count, area, and width into one intuitive grammar.

A five-year morphology

The repeated flower behaves like a set of small multiples; variations in petals and disks make year-to-year differences immediately visible.

A choreography of themes

Categorical color and variable ribbon width carry the weight and continuity of themes—from family to painting—in a choreographed movement.

Quantity beneath color

The numeric baseline and stem widths beneath the color blocks reveal the rigorous quantitative scaffold supporting the poetic surface.