Serendipity and all that: May 2011

Sun bleached to an ethereal white the fragile bone against the stark blue sky. That’s one way to describe a Georgia O’keeffe painting if I must. Although, why one should bother with words at all is a more moot point. As an admirer of her work, I have perhaps a lot to share in terms of how her art affects and inspires me. The subjects that she chose to engage with through her paintings also resonate with me at a very primeval level. Flowers, shells, rocks, desert landscape and animal bones. Objects of nature held in reverence and painted in prayer. By a woman and an artist who dared to defy the existing norms of 1920s American society and culture to come up with a voice of her own in the modern art movement of the early 20^th century.

Georgia O’keeffe’s artistic brilliance manages to convey the compelling beauty of nature as a powerful contrast to the widespread industrialization of the period. Her large format paintings of enlarged blossom magically draw you in, to their lush, velvety folds, petal by petal. Soft, sensuous, feminine and saturated with life and colour, these paintings are as intricate in detail as they are simple in their subject.

Interestingly enough, after spending a summer at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, she became besotted with the area. The remote, barren landscape and the expansive skies above now became the subject of her paintings. She found exquisite beauty in the bony skulls of dead animals and painted them extensively. Magnified against the still blue sky, the bones scorched to whiteness by the desert sun, strangely become hypnotic in their stillness. To me, these meditations in minimalism seem to serve a dual purpose. As you gaze at the open sky in the paintings, they offer to take you away into the infinite beyond and at the same time when you shift focus to the magnified presence of the animal bone, you are brought back to the finite moment at hand.

Georgia O’keeffe’s paintings, irrespective of their subject, are characterized by beauty of form, shape and colour. Without doubt, her work is born from a deeply feminine core and is devotedly nurtured in breathtaking detail. It is the perfect case of an artist painting entirely for herself and no one else. And that perhaps is one of the reasons why they are so impressively unique in their incorruptibility. Incidentally, Georgia O’keeffe was the first woman honoured with a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. She sold her first Giant Flower painting in 1928, when she was 41 years old. The painting “Calla Lily” sold for $25,000. A year before she died, one of her paintings sold for $1,000,000. And today, with more than 3000 works, the Georgia O’keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico houses the largest permanent collection of her work.

Here are a few of my personal favourites.