1 post tagged “georgia o'keeffe”
Show us something by your favorite artist.
Submitted by Miss Parker.
When I was younger and in the habit of hanging things on my walls (nowadays, I utilize a corkboard that has the United States on it to pin small mementos that I want to see every day), my aunt Debbie and I went to some sort of art store. I must have been thirteen or so. And we both picked out prints of artwork and then she bought me the poster as a little aunt-to-niece, no-special-reason present. She picked out a Van Gogh print and I picked out Georgia O'Keeffe's "Dark Iris I."
I loved purple then, just as I adore the vivid shades of lilac and violet and indigo now. That's what drew me to this print, I'm sure, because I know that I had no idea who O'Keeffe was at that time.
But then when I was in tenth grade, I took a Painting I course at my high school, taught by a woman who had been teaching there for more than forty years at that time and, in fact, is still teaching there to this day. She had a completely different style of teaching than I was accustomed to, telling all of us to finish things whenever we wanted as long as it was by the end of the semester and routinely beginning new assignments before any of us were done with the two she'd already given us that week. It was such a weird way to learn, very collegiate for fifteen year olds, but kind of enjoyable in that "I can put this stuff off forever! La la la, paint paint paint, talk talk talk, dance the Time Warp with the adorably fun redheaded artsy twin girls...oh shit, it's the midterms" sort of way. You know the one I mean.
Anyway, I enjoyed painting though I had, and still have, the oddly unartistic habit of outlining whatever I'm painting. Everything that I've ever created with watercolors or oils has a black border around it to some degree. I like lines, dammit, can't anyone understand me?
One day, the teacher told me that what I was painting, a mountain scene that I was trying to utilize to paint out a recurring dream of mine involving purple cliffs and pushing people off of them (...yep), reminded her of something very similar to O'Keeffe. And she got out all her Big Books of Art and showed me several sections on Georgia's Irises and woodland scenes and vaginas and whatnot.
(I didn't see the vaginas. Only other people see the vaginas, in fact, my parents were skirting around the issue of my sexuality for a few years in there when I insisted on only having what most people consider the most vagina-esque prints of O'Keeffe in my bedroom. I felt like saying, "Yes, yes, Mother and Father, I'm a lesbian who likes painted vaginas! Can't anyone understand me? Again?")
I realized that the print that I already had was an O'Keeffe which was something I hadn't paid much attention to, up until that point, and then I became a huge O'Keeffe freak and had her stuff all over my room, as well as several photographs that her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had taken of her.
Perhaps the picture at right also had my parents wondering. But the combined artistic talent of Stieglitz and O'Keeffe is fascinating. The fact that she used the world around her and her husband's influences to create her art and that Stieglitz, in part, used his world and Georgia's physical form to create his art is...symbiotic. And beautiful, I think.
If or when I travel to the southwest, my very first stop would be in Santa Fe for the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. I don't even know anyone who has ever been there but I imagine wonderful things. At the very least, I would buy this excellent O'K mug. And I know I can buy it online for only six bucks and have it shipped to me but that wouldn't be the same thing at all, would it?
But then when I was in tenth grade, I took a Painting I course at my high school, taught by a woman who had been teaching there for more than forty years at that time and, in fact, is still teaching there to this day. She had a completely different style of teaching than I was accustomed to, telling all of us to finish things whenever we wanted as long as it was by the end of the semester and routinely beginning new assignments before any of us were done with the two she'd already given us that week. It was such a weird way to learn, very collegiate for fifteen year olds, but kind of enjoyable in that "I can put this stuff off forever! La la la, paint paint paint, talk talk talk, dance the Time Warp with the adorably fun redheaded artsy twin girls...oh shit, it's the midterms" sort of way. You know the one I mean.
Anyway, I enjoyed painting though I had, and still have, the oddly unartistic habit of outlining whatever I'm painting. Everything that I've ever created with watercolors or oils has a black border around it to some degree. I like lines, dammit, can't anyone understand me?
One day, the teacher told me that what I was painting, a mountain scene that I was trying to utilize to paint out a recurring dream of mine involving purple cliffs and pushing people off of them (...yep), reminded her of something very similar to O'Keeffe. And she got out all her Big Books of Art and showed me several sections on Georgia's Irises and woodland scenes and vaginas and whatnot.
(I didn't see the vaginas. Only other people see the vaginas, in fact, my parents were skirting around the issue of my sexuality for a few years in there when I insisted on only having what most people consider the most vagina-esque prints of O'Keeffe in my bedroom. I felt like saying, "Yes, yes, Mother and Father, I'm a lesbian who likes painted vaginas! Can't anyone understand me? Again?")
I realized that the print that I already had was an O'Keeffe which was something I hadn't paid much attention to, up until that point, and then I became a huge O'Keeffe freak and had her stuff all over my room, as well as several photographs that her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had taken of her.
Perhaps the picture at right also had my parents wondering. But the combined artistic talent of Stieglitz and O'Keeffe is fascinating. The fact that she used the world around her and her husband's influences to create her art and that Stieglitz, in part, used his world and Georgia's physical form to create his art is...symbiotic. And beautiful, I think.
If or when I travel to the southwest, my very first stop would be in Santa Fe for the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. I don't even know anyone who has ever been there but I imagine wonderful things. At the very least, I would buy this excellent O'K mug. And I know I can buy it online for only six bucks and have it shipped to me but that wouldn't be the same thing at all, would it?
