I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum while I was in Santa Fe. I knew only broad outlines of her life, and had seen a lot of up-close flowers, and stark landscapes that were her work. I learned some interesting details, and refreshed my general perception of who she was.

The museum is organized more or less chronologically for the paintings. It includes two rooms at the end of the exhibit about O’Keeffe’s life and ways of working. They were charming. For example, O’Keeffe loved cooking but her kitchen was still spare, keeping objects to a minimum. Her cookbooks were organic. Her dresses were custom-made for her by a friend, using a French pattern, but altogether she probably had five or six of them and they looked pretty similar.

Her workroom includes sculptures which she did at the end of her life, when she was going blind. It also includes jars of pigment that, I THINK, she ground up herself. The exhibit says that she added these pigments to her paints to make them more intense. I remember crayons called burnt umber and siena red in my crayon box, lo these many years ago. They actually mimicked colors from Italy, in Umbria and Siena. That’s what I think went on here in Abiqui but I couldn’t quite tell.

O’Keeffe was originally trained in watercolors. It was considered proper for women, according to the wall sticker by a watercolor, done when she was fifteen. 

Be that as it may, O’Keeffe switched to oils when she got a chance. I am somewhat afraid to comment on the difference in the two mediums, being quite ignorant. All the same … I watched some Youtube videos once, and oils and acrylics can be layered, while water color usually isn’t. The layering produces color that is subtle. We all saw this in Peterboro when our amazing artist started by coloring her whole canvas yellow-brown when the meadow, mountain, and sky, looked more blue and green.

A basic motif in all the wall write-ups is that O’Keeffe said she had to stop listening to others in order to paint what she wanted to paint. No-one could teach her how to do what she wanted to do, she said, because no-one saw what she saw. 

I love what she saw. She looked at tiny things and blew them up in her minds-eye and painted the result. People called some of the results abstract art. 

I took this picture outside the museum because it looked so crazy. If you cropped it in various ways it would look very abstract, but it is just part of the root system of a giant cottonwood.

O’Keeffe painted a New York skyscraper, that is not abstract. This photo, taken with my phone, is not a good reproduction. The museum says its copyright follows high quality reproductions so I can put the picture up on my blog without breaking copyright. … but you can see that the real picture is lovely.

The wall description included the idea that other artists of New York at the time told her that she should leave painting New York to the male artists of the time. I went looking for male artists from around 1910 to 1920 and found a blog called Ephemeral NewYork. 

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/1920s-new-york-city-painters/

I found these names on the blog: Charles Hoffbauer, Paul Cornoyer, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Julian Alden Weir, Colin Campbell Cooper, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and two from a bit earlier, Childe Hassam and Fernand Lungren around 1897. There are blog posts or Twitter/X postings with a picture, and a bit of commentary, on each of these guys. I don’t see that O’Keeffe’s New York is way better, or way worse, than most of them.

And here is a picture of Santa Fe.