Sorry- photo unavailable although you can see Marisol Escobar’s sculptor of Georgia O’Keefe in San Francisco, CA at Sydney G. Walton Square 

GEORGIA O’KEEFE: A WOMAN ON PAPER

“Her strange art affects people, especially its resourcefulness in dealing with what has been  deemed inexpressible.”                        The Christian Science Monitor

 

              If you google Georgia O’Keefe, you’ll undoubtedly find that she’s considered to be one of the most significant artists of the 20th century; the Mother of American Modernism; and the first female to make a comfortable living from her art work. I first discovered Ms. O’Keefe’s paintings in an exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) when I was a teenager living on the outskirts of New York City.

            Art exhibits can either bore you to tears if the artist is not to your liking; leave an empty feeling in your gut if you don’t grasp the concept or emotional depth of the work, or spin a spell-bound web of divineness as the art envelopes you in rapture. Of course at fifteen, I didn’t have the language to describe how I felt about her portraits of flowers, leaves, landscapes, nudes and bones. Even her abstracts had an other-worldly effect on me. While I wasn’t an art virgin, nothing prepared me for her paintings of “Light Iris” or “Grey Line with Black, Blue and Yellow.” So intense was the erotic intimacy, I might as well have been looking at a photo of myself, from the inside. Some of her other paintings also touched my psyche. I’d been to upstate New York for decades and while I loved the mountains, I never saw anything as spectacular as her Birch Trees on Lake George nor did I ever gaze at anything as majestic as Red Hills, Lake George on my trips upstate.

            Georgia saw beauty where I saw the emptiness of the mundane. She made me realize that I needed to find a way into the soul and heart of the everyday. For me, that point of entry was writing. Susan W. Albert, author of “Someone Always Nearby” says it best when quoting Maria Chabot, Ms. O’Keefe’s hired man: “I wanted to write in the way O’Keefe painted with discipline, persistence and a perceptive eye.”

            For over 50 year I considered myself to be a big fan of Georgia O’Keefe. Then came the crash. Georgia fell off the pedestal and my admiration of her was smashed to smithereens. Things revealed in the book about Georgia’s character were too abhorrent for me to overlook.  Perhaps allowing a fictional account of a secondary source to taint my opinion seemed rash but after doing some research, the information stated in the book checked out. I could write it off as just a “sign of the times” but it posed a conundrum for me. I have, in the past, refused to highlight certain men because of their character flaws and abhorrent beliefs. Should I give a woman a pass simply because I loved the art work?

            This is the first time I’ve questioned whether or not a woman deserved to be memorialized in stone, commemorated in marble or etched in bronze. I figured if someone else has already vetted the women, hired a sculptor to create a statue, found the funding and partnership with a reputable organization to house it, then the woman was as good as gold. Yet I wrestled for a while with this problem. Here’s my conclusion: while Ms. O’Keefe used an  offensive trigger word for most of her adult life and was possibly guilty of treating many people in her employ poorly, she did have the capacity to turn any landscape into a beautiful canvas. The men with questionable judgment never raised women’s status in the art world nor did they inspire generations of people to look at something as more than face value. They certainly didn’t reveal to us that light can live in darkness and resplendence can be found in decay.

            When I look at a painting of Ms. O’Keefe’s I don’t see the offensive word she used. Instead I see the way she mixed her pallet till she found a softer hue. I see beauty in shifting perspective. I see the forgiveness of Mother Earth. I see Nature blossoming under a gentle touch.  

When I look at Georgia’s massive volume of art, I don’t see a painter who disrespected her employees. I see a painter who was lost in the world of words but with the brush of a few strokes, she could immerse herself in a universe that basked in color, danced among light and shadows and turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. Imperfect though she may have been, each and every canvas she created was perfection; and that is the main reason she will rock this blog.

Women Rock! Their statues and stories empower us, even the flawed ones.