Sparks are flying

Last week I visited the “My New Yorks” exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. (You can catch it through September 22.) You know, it’s been nine years since I began this book. I’ve traveled to exhibits beyond Chicago, to New York, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Houston, Sydney, London, and Toronto.

And after all this time, I am still learning new things about O’Keeffe. And I am still loving the process.

And, I’m wondering, why? Why haven’t I gotten bored?

Well, first of all, that’s how my brain works. I love a deep, deep dive. I love a complicated mass of information to sort out. All those firing neurons—that’s what gives me a buzz. As a professor, I’ve taken on a lot of juicy subjects. This one is certainly the grandest.

The amount of primary source material on O’Keeffe is prodigious. Remember hand-written letters? She wrote a lot (I mean a LOT) of them. I really love reading correspondence. I’ve always loved to read epistolary books. (Two faves: Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickock edited by Rodger Stretmatter and Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters by Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence.) They are intimate and unfiltered. I think: that’s how you can get closest to an historical figure.

There are several published books of O’Keeffe correspondence. There’s one with her husband Alfred Stieglitz and another with her friend Maria Chabot. Also, scholar Amy Von Lintel has a compiled a volume of letters written during the artist’s time in Texas.

The one I love best is Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer, edited by Clive Giboire. That’s O’Keeffe as an emerging artist, in all her outrageous ambition and self-doubt.

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Then there are the artworks themselves. Year by year, I have been peeling back the layers of understanding. First, trying to getting my arms around the whole body of work. Slowly getting to know the individual works, with the help of O’Keeffe Museum conservator Dale Kronkright, who knows best what mysteries lie below their surface.

Then making the connections among the paintings. Between paintings in the same series, paintings in the same year, paintings across the decades.

My brain sparks when I spy a fresh connection. In Chicago, I found a precedent, staring me right in the face, for the patio door series way back in New York, well before she moved into that Abiquiu home with the patio door and adobe steps.

It’s a rush. And that feeling of discovery is what I’m hoping to convey in my book. Fingers crossed.