We’ve posted a lot about Georgia O’Keeffe on instagram. It’s hard to say exactly why this woman inspires us so much. I think she even inadvertently influenced the Wyld branding!
Is it her attention to the natural world? Even to things like a tiny flower or an old bone lying in the desert? Things that most people would turn away from she stared at with wonder. She collected stones that she found on her long walks in the canyon, placed them around her home like great works of art. Same with cow skulls and commonplace driftwood. She painted them over and over again, transforming the mundane into the mystical.
Is it the place she captures? (I really love New Mexico. Didn’t visit until I was well into adulthood, but it got into my soul.) She knew what it meant to really belong to a place. Most of us would get tired of a little patch of desert but she didn’t, she always found something new to discover in it.
It reminds me of something Robin Wall Kimmerer termed as “becoming indigenous to place” in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. When O’Keeffe moved from New York, she allowed herself to become deeply a part of New Mexico. There was no bringing New York to New Mexico. There was just New Mexico. And she was just another creature in its landscape, like the cattle and rattlesnakes, the sagebrush and mesquite. She was swept of her feet by its dust storms, delighted in becoming the color of the dirt.
Maybe it’s simply her life, her courage, her drive to create even before it was okay for women to go off on their own artistic paths, to keep creating even after she’d gone pretty much blind. When her sight became so bad that she couldn’t paint at all, she began sculpting.
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
Her work is sensuous. Full of curves and color. Her paintings are rich, and big. They’re not quite of this world. Critics have noted how much she relied on intuition during the creative process. “O’Keeffe was unapologetically true to her own vision,” her biography reads. “When she did attempt to supersede her intuition to complete hired work, she became troubled and always retreated back to what felt familiar and natural.”
And this woman had style. Not an overly done style. She was modern and minimalist by nature, keeping only the items she needed for the functions of life, but she made sure those items were the most beautiful versions of themselves. A conscious consumer long before that was a thing.
From the dresses she wore and even helped design, to the smallest nooks and crannies of her home and studio, her entire life was part of her artistic vision.
Many people saw her as a stoic, impenetrable personality who wanted to have a say in how she was portrayed. I think this is deeply unfair. Who would say such a thing about a man? Women, especially in her time, are culturally expected to make themselves available to the service of others They’re supposed to be very nice, eager to please, constantly molding themselves to desires not their own, and they’re supposed to stay busy managing all the tedious details of life. O’Keeffe didn’t play into any of that. She had boundaries. She had a vision. She wanted to know and constantly reconnect with her authentic self. And why shouldn’t she?
People who actually knew her say she was lighthearted and fun, with a wonderful sense of humor. Another reminder that, while photographs may not lie, they never tell the full story either. She loved to work in her garden and cook from scratch. Loved having visitors on her ranch and welcomed friends from all over the world, some of them very famous, many just ordinary people.
O’Keeffe was an artist who’s work is mostly looked at – that’s what she preferred, actually, saying that her paintings communicated everything worth knowing. But now there are a lot of books about her too. The ones we have here at the studio are Living Modern and Georgia O’Keeffe At Home. I can recommend both! There is one titled Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place that I’d love to get my hands on as well.
Stay tuned for more Wyld Reads. Up next is a very special book that we mentioned above – Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
