Art in the Form of Spring Tulips
The perfect mountain tulip festival
Recently I got the chance to visit a tulip festival, and the arrangement of the flowers and the beautiful bursts of color stuck with me as an incredible work of art! It was an amazing way to spend a Spring afternoon, surrounded by color and life and art.
Every year I have a hard time deciding what my favorite season is. Often I end up falling in love with whichever season is next, and right now that’s Spring. After the last snow of winter, green buds started appearing on the trees, and then, purples and pinks exploded all around! For weeks now, there have been bright, vibrant colors everywhere, signaling the incredible growth that comes with the warmer weather and early-spring showers. And, of course, with this transition in the seasons comes flowers!
If you’ve been with me for any amount of time, you probably know that I love flowers. My wife and I always have them around our home, and my phone’s photo gallery is often full of pictures of flowers of all kinds. I have never really been able to tack down a favorite flower, but Spring often makes a great case for tulips
The Tulip Festival
This last weekend, my wife and I, along with a friend from church, decided to visit a local tulip festival at a farm that’s tucked away in the mountains, not far from where we live. This was apparently the first year this particular farm was doing this - they usually just do a pumpkin patch and corn maze in the fall - but they decided to go all in this Spring and plant over 400,000 tulips! On Saturday, we made the drive up to the farm, and we were immediately enamored with the rows and rows of blooms that stretched out in front of us when we arrived.
Something about me you may not know is that I change my favorite color fairly often. That is, I usually switch it about once a year or so, which I’ve been told is a bit unusual. Part of the reason for this is that when I hit a particular season of the year, I tend to become mildly obsessed with one of the colors around me, eventually making it my favorite. For instance, in Autumn I almost always switch my favorite color back to the deep, rich red that bursts from the trees around me. In the Spring, I usually tend back towards green, but this year, I have actually been pushed even further to red, largely because of the stunning colors I saw in the rows of tulips.
The flowers were arranged in the shape of a giant butterfly that we, along with many others, walked through, taking dozens of pictures as we went. I was stunned by the variety of colors there were. We saw reds and pinks and oranges and purples all meticulously arranged on the “wings,” and then we noticed that some rows had tulips that even had multiple colors on the blooms! There were white ones with purple and red ones with splashes of oranges, and I loved them all! The ones that most captured my imagination, though, were the brilliant reds that covered sections of the butterfly design. They were different that the Autumn reds I’ve always loved since they were more pink-red than orange-red, but I absolutely loved the color all the same. By the time we left, I found myself once again committing to red as my favorite color. Better luck to green and purple next Spring!
It was amazing to see how much effort had been put into creating such a big piece of art that people could come out to enjoy. I admired the artistry behind the patterns and arrangement of the flowers, and I clearly wasn’t the only one. We took a TON of pictures, as you can imagine. I even brought our Polaroid out to take a few. I’ve been practicing using the manual settings to get the brightness right, and I was pretty happy with the results! The photos showed a wonderfully colorful scene, overlaid with a warm, nostalgic filter. I already can’t wait to look back at the day through the lens of that camera decades from now.
We had the option to buy a small vase and pick a handful of flowers to take home with us, so, of course, we did! We must have spent nearly half an hour crawling through the rows to find the perfect blossoms and pick the right mix of colors for our home. In a small way, it was fun to participate in the art by creating our own arrangement to take with us. It felt like we were all a part of the art of Spring!
The Beauty of Spring
I am a sucker for agricultural attractions like this. In Autumn, I always find a way to go see the local corn maze and pick pumpkins and sunflowers, and I was ecstatic to visit the a tulip field now in the Spring. Having never really been to anything like this before, I was in awe of all the many colors that surround us as we walked the butterfly wings. It was definitely the kind of thing that pictures couldn’t quite capture. It was also so nice to walk through a field of flowers with no agenda but enjoyment and peace. It truly felt like Spring being surrounded by joyful life and beauty. One day I’d like to visit some of the famous tulip fields in Europe, but until then, this was a great way to experience this form of art closer to home.
Once again, I’m struck by how people love to create art with nature. There’s something about the natural world around us that inspires us to create with it and in its image. I’ve said this before, but I see a beautiful thread woven from Creator to Creation and all the way down to the art we create by arranging and capturing the natural world around us.
What art have you seen this Spring? Have you been to a tulip field?
Thanks for visiting the Every Day Museum of Art! I hope you enjoyed this exhibit about my experience at the Tulip Festival. If you want to read more about everyday art like this, we would love for you to join the community of artists and art-enjoyers here!
Oh wow, it's so cool that you got to visit a tulip festival!
Beautiful photos! There’s a tulip festival not far from me I’ve been to a couple times, and I love seeing the vast fields of tulips there!