As soon as I saw it: that was my country. She learnt to drive and purchased a Ford, driving to Navajo sites in Arizona, Colorado and Utah and attending Native American dances. During 1929 she was the guest of arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos.
She started visiting New Mexico the year before and in 1949 would move there permanently, buying Ghost Ranch from the Roman Catholic Church. This is an openly licensed image taken from her New Mexico residence, Ghost Ranch, where many of her most famous landscapes and skull and sky works were painted.īlack Mesa was painted of the Rio Grande Valley in 1930 while O’Keeffe was visiting the ranch of her friend Marie Tudor Garland. What I didn’t note, and what I don’t recall the exhibition exploring is the openness with which O’Keeffe proclaimed this to be her country. The blues still stand out, no matter the version I am viewing.Īrtotem from Here, There, and., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Landscape and possession I can vividly recall the excitement of seeing the work and the itch to move paint around the canvas. These colours are not what I recall, however, due to the reproductions in catalogues and on the screen being so different from each other and from the artwork itself seen under gallery lighting. It’s all so deceptively simple but somehow makes me slightly breathless taking it in. The green treeline at the bottom provides a kind of respite from the heat and harshness of the rest of the composition. Among the orange folds of the rock formation O’Keeffe has used pale greens and I notice mauve near the black mid-mountain range. The contrast of blue and orange provides an obvious hook but there’s more going on in the mountains and even 8 years later I still really enjoy looking at this picture. Below are smaller black and grey mountains and an orange range that gives way to a few sparse trees at the bottom of the canvas. Among the blues are black shadows and white slopes, carving the terrain and giving it movement and the quality of shifting light under moving clouds. My eyes go straight to the five or six blues making up the mountain range in this painting. The photograph catches some of the reflective surface of oil on canvas. This reproduction taken by someone visiting the painting at its home in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, gives an impression of the brushstrokes that so captivated me in the Tate show. View Black Mesa landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie's II on flickr.
American artist new mexico scenery series#
Reflecting on O’Keeffe now, and this work again after 8 years, this issue of Slow Looking explores my changing impressions of her work, as well as attempting to trace some of the critical responses to her work over time (which the Artwork# series is always attempting to do). I liked the painting so much I bought the fridge magnet sized copy of it. I made notes on my phone about her brushstrokes, singling out a particular painting Black Mesa landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II (1930) because of the blue brushstrokes. This is the most rewarding exhibition I’ve seen on my trip so far and it makes me itch to paint. As a lover of flowers and colour and abstraction I was keen to see these oils in the flesh. Georgia O’Keeffe’s first major retrospective outside the U.S. As part of a research trip for my PhD I visited the National Archives in Kew and attempted to see as many galleries and museums as I could.
In 2016 I was visiting London for the first time.
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