She got to see O’Keeffe painting

One of the greatest, and most exasperating, pleasures of writing an archivally-researched book is going down the proverbial rabbit hole.

The O’Keeffe book gives me so many opportunities! There are so many fascinating people who emerge in the artist’s story.

Last week I went down the rabbit hole to learn more about Frances O’Brien, a close friend of O’Keeffe’s for 50 years.

O’Brien, a young artist studying at the Art Students League, met O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz at the opening of a group show at the Anderson Galleries in March 1925. They grew very close very quickly, and by August the next year she was their guest at Lake George.

There O’Keeffe coached the young artist on her painting. She made quite a fuss about edges. “You’ve got to feel the edge,” she urged her protégé. “I was kind of a disciple, you might say. I was the closest, she said, she’d ever had to a student.” When O’Keeffe guest curated an exhibition at the Opportunity Gallery in 1928, she included four paintings by O’Brien.

While she was at Lake George, Stieglitz made three portraits of O’Brien, partially and fully nude. (Click here to see one of them.)

O’Brien was one of the few people who ever saw O’Keeffe painting — at Lake George and later at Ghost Ranch. She wasn’t interested in theories, O’Brien, recalled — only in technique.

This is how she described O’Keeffe’s technique:

“O’Keeffe had a very meticulous way of painting. Her palette was very neat. No muddy browns. She wore a big white apron.

She started with very small pencil sketches. She did them on an airplane or just sitting beside you. If it was a landscape, she would go out and sit in her open car with her easel and paint New Mexico.

She would start from the left-hand corner of the canvas and just work down. She had it so worked out in her mind. That’s why she got such wonderful texture. She didn’t overpaint. Usually you never get just the original brush stroke, but she did.

She made her own canvases, stretching and sizing them with white lead paint. And she never got sick from that, either. That (white lead paint) gave them a glowing look. She would use several coats. Then she would make a very light charcoal sketch that you would never see. Then from the left-hand corner she would move down. And each time (she moved down) she would change the brush to keep it clean. She didn’t go over it again. And that preserved that beautiful light quality.

I never knew anyone else that could do that.”

O’Brien became a noted portraitist of political and social icons, publishing them, most notably, as covers for The Saturday Review magazine. She invented a technique she called “Prismatic,” inspired by what she learned about edges from O’Keeffe.

Here’s a pen and ink portrait, undated, that she made of O’Keeffe. You can see how she folded three of O’Keeffe’s paintings into the background (from left): “Blue Lines X” (1916), “Black Cross with Stars and Blue” (1929), and one of the pelvis series.

Alas, their friendship came to an abrupt end some time in the late 1970s, after an episode at the Abiquiu House when O’Brien found O’Keeffe’s behavior “insulting, unforgiveable.”