Category: blog
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O’Keeffe gone digital
It was just a matter of time before Georgia O’Keeffe went immersive. Around the world, artists like Van Gogh, Monet, and Kahlo have already been given the full-on high-tech treatment.
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Georgia O’Keeffe: rewarding curiosity
Georgia O’Keeffe never piled on the paint. She worked wet-into-dry, pretty much a single layer of paint requiring serious control to choreograph her textural effects. Within this narrow range that she chose to work, her variations are virtuosic.
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Georgia O’Keeffe’s final paintings
In case you missed my zoom talk, it’s now available online! It’s my first reading from the work-in-progress: Digging for Stars: The Art of Georgia O’Keeffe. I won’t deny it — the debut was nerve-wracking. My thanks go out to Susan Post of BookWoman and Stephanie Lowe for making it happen. In her late-80s, nearly…
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You’re invited!
After years of researching and writing, I am giving my first public talk from my book manuscript, “Digging for Stars: The Art of Georgia O’Keeffe.” The talk is FREE, and it’s ONLINE hosted by the fabulous BookWoman bookstore, so you can attend, no matter where you are! Tune in this coming Tuesday, February 22, at…
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Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer
Georgia O’Keeffe spent 30 years with the legendary American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. She worked alongside him, posed for him, and even spotted prints for him. But she knew not a lick about taking photographs. “Stieglitz used to say I knew less about photography than anybody he ever knew,” she told a journalist in 1962. “Yet,…
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Georgia O’Keeffe up-close in new book
Just in time for the holidays comes a new Georgia O’Keeffe picture book, this one by Malcom Varon. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life Well-Lived gives us a glimpse into Varon’s experience with O’Keeffe when he was taking photographs of her paintings at her Abiquiu home in late summer/early fall 1977, when she was nearly 90. (Photographic…
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O’Keeffe: rapturous possibilities
I had the experience, once, of viewing an O’Keeffe exhibit that made me question what I had ever admired in the artist. The paintings felt curiously lifeless, and as a whole the show didn’t seem to add up to much. O’Keeffe understood early on that the way paintings are hung determine how they are perceived.…
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Georgia O’Keeffe’s last visit with Ansel Adams, on video
The 50-year friendship between Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams began when they met in Taos, New Mexico, in 1929. It’s no surprise that O’Keeffe, who loved to trek across big country in Texas and New Mexico, took to him. He was an intrepid photographer, clambering over dangerous terrain to make his iconic photographs. (In late…
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Hey, that’s me on YouTube!
I spend so much time hunkered down, doing research and developing a book proposal, that I haven’t been posting much lately. Sorry about that! But my friend and actress extraordinaire Francesca Christian coaxed me into doing an interview, the first in her series called “On the Horizon.” She asked terrific questions (why O’Keeffe, what’s the…
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Sculpture or incinerator?
Just in case we thought Georgia O’Keeffe was all work and no play . . . This picture, accessed from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s online collection, came with a story from its donor, Brian Garfield. Garfield was the son of O’Keeffe’s good friend, Frances O’Brien. The object, Garfield explained, is a trash incinerator, of undetermined…
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What would Miss O’Keeffe say?
Am taking a little break from wall-to-wall O’Keeffe research, and I thought you could use a little break, too! (If the video embed does not show above, you can click through to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acJ00D4SALw.)
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Was Georgia O’Keeffe an angry woman?
As an art student in New York, Georgia O’Keeffe realized that any distraction, like dancing late into the night, would impinge upon her prime directive: to paint. For her, anger was just another distraction.
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Georgia O’Keeffe in comic form
My (seemingly endless) research on Georgia O’Keeffe leads me down a lot of unexpected paths, none more enchanting than the comic strip I recently discovered. Lest we assume that O’Keeffe appeals mostly to women, and mostly older women, consider the case of Todd Webb, a cartoonist/illustrator and songwriter who has taken his inspiration from the…
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Georgia O’Keeffe: never a catholic, maybe a buddhist
“I feel I’m a very religious person — religion to me means respect for people — but I’m not in a religion.”
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Holiday greetings from Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe was not religious in the institutional sense, but she was deeply spiritual and certainly enjoyed a good ritual. She usually celebrated Christmas with friends, and sent Christmas cards, including one in 1963 that reproduced her 1917 masterpiece, “Starlight Night” (above). In the 1970s, according to her then caregiver and secretary Agapita Lopez (now…