Not hot. Humid. Very humid. That was the state of the weather around Boston today. The sky was filled with layers of gray-blue clouds. Everything beneath seemed desaturated of color. And what did I think as I wandered the city on my way into work: how would Georgia O’Keefe paint this landscape? What colors would she select from her kit to capture this surreal view?
O’Keefe has been influencing my view of the world ever since I stumbled upon the book, Abstraction, at the Somerville Public Library. Created as part of the Whitney Museum’s recent art exhibit, the book highlights O’Keefe’s early abstract work, and includes transcripts of her letters written during the period. The letters were only recently unsealed, twenty years after the painter’s death. O’Keefe’s paintings have always inspired me and these early works are no different. Her use of color, the lines and angles, how the light shifts and shadows are created … I became lost in each image on the page.
The images, while beautiful, did not surprise me. It was the letters. Most if not all, I believe, are correspondence between her and her future husband, Alfred Stieglitz. In them, a very young and vulnerable O’Keefe paints with words her views of the world. Of the sky at dawn, she writes, “… the sky was perfectly cloudless — a deep pink like a hot kiss where it met the ocean.” And of jade artifacts at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, “… colors like you find in the mosses and lichens and soil of the woods — or even in the things washed up by the sea …”
Learn more about O’Keefe’s abstract art and her letters via the Whitney Museum’s exhibit website. It’s well worth the effort!
Words + Images 
