Portrait – Georgia O’Keefe
THE EVERYWOMAN MAGAZINE
First she took New York then New Mexico. Despite her straight shooting reputation as the woman in black, Georgia loved colour. “I paint because colour is a significant language to me.” She once said. It has to be noted that at the time her vibrant aural pieces like Music - Pink and Blue No. 2 were being released, bright colour was not in fashion and floral subjects were snuffed as trivial women’s business. Ironically, one said flower painting by Georgia, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 broke the record in 2014 for the most expensive painting ever sold by a woman painter at $44.4 million. Trivial nonetheless.
It has been since revealed that Georgia self-crafted her public image for photographers which accommodated to the black & white film techniques common for the time. Her formal taste in dress was very much tailored for this medium while behind her adobe doors her sartorial palette, while still discerning did enjoy modernist pattern and primary colours. She wore Japanese kimonos as private house-wear and tonal ensembles like denim on denim or all-red attire for her desert uniform. Reflective of her upbringing as a dairy farmer’s daughter, she was a skilled seamstress and handmade many of her signature pieces. Similar to her abstract forms, her style was sans frills and focused on silhouette.
Having caught the eye of many influential creatives including Joan Didion, Calvin Klein, Andy Warhol and Yayoi Kasama. It was art historian, curator and author Wanda M. Corn who looked at Georgia’s rural life out in the desert and saw a story untold. Her now iconic exhibition and book titled Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern was innovative in the sense that it took in the surrounds of an artist, not just the studio life. This new angle may have single-handedly revived millennial mania for Georgia as an artist but also her universal appeal as a poster woman for our modern ways. Collecting pebbles has seen no greater popularity since. So it is strange to imagine given our newfound obsession with the southwest desert that even as late as the 80s, Georgia was known more as a New York painter. The little fame she had was very much entwined with her life with Stieglitz as his wife. Her life was reported in black and white.
“Part of the reason we don’t do the surround in the case of O’Keeffe,” Wanda notes, “this goes back to feminism, we didn’t want to overly feminise her. One way that might naturally happen would have been to emphasise domesticity in her life. Of food, her gardens...” Of course we’re all well aware now of the fantastic gardens Georgia kept at both her Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch residencies in New Mexico. Her clay homes have inspired a pilgrimage of devotees to her art and way of living.
Whether it was in the way she dressed, to the way she prepared and put food on the table, to the way she put her living room together or painted in the studio, Georgia had a kind of artistic synchronicity across so many parts of her life. In a modern vocabulary we would call it mindful or conscious. A life devoted to solitude, space and slow practices. A hearty chef and gardener, Georgia’s diet, like her art, was ahead of its time. She celebrated the wonders of natural ingredients in her kitchen, preferring organic meats and grains, homemade and homegrown. The fierce bravado that precedes her as an intimidating character in the studio softens in the light of her pantry.
Despite whispers of rather erotic liaisons with both women and men including Mabel Dodge, Rebecca Strand and Jean Toomer, perhaps her sweetest love story of all may be her devotion to her fluffy chocolate Chow Chows. During her marriage to Stieglitz, Georgia had longed for a child but since he had already had a daughter with his previous marriage he felt children would not be compatible to their lifestyle and interrupt her art. After a neighbour gifted her two blue Chow puppies in 1953 at the ranch, she became loyal to the breed. “It seems to be my mission in life to wait on a dog.” Georgia has been quoted. During her lifetime she had six including Bobo,Chia, Jinga and Inca. Of whom she referred to as her “little people”. C.S. Merrill documented their special bond in her book Weekends with O’Keeffe: “She reached out and patted Jingo. The dog and Miss O’Keeffe had quite a rapport between them.Miss O’Keeffe was telling little jokes about her... She said to her, “Jingo, you know the most beautiful thing about you is your tail.” The furry companions featured affectionately in her letter writing and she often made sketches and photographs of the dogs.
“Bo and Chia are maybe my best friends here – I enjoy them very much,” Georgia wrote to a friend. “The male lies on my window seat now with his legs stretched straight out behind him- looking like a fine big cattapillar. They sleep in my room at night and in the day time are always just outside the door.”
When Georgia’s eyesight began to fail in the 1970s, she had white carpet laid in her Abiquiu studio just so she could see the dark dogs better. Her last red chow Jingo passed just before the artist died herself, at the ripe age of 98 years old. True to form, in her final decade she had taken up the new medium of ceramics, a tactile form more conducive to her altered senses. “I think it’s so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary – you’re happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.” Words straight from the horse’s mouth, the mother of American Modernism.