Big skies and Georgia O'Keeffe

Judy. In the early ‘70’s, I moved from Alabama to Denver, Colorado, to start graduate school. Coming from an area of the country that’s filled with trees, I was overwhelmed by the vastness of the sky. One could see for such long distances! By the time we moved to Arizona, I was completely comfortable with it, and when, some years later, we returned to the South, all the trees, which I loved as I grew up, gave me claustrophobia. 

Over the years I’ve learned to love both—to appreciate the beauty of the forests in the South and embrace the wideness of the sky in the West. Montana, which we love, is, of course, known as Big Sky Country, and most of the west follows suit.

Big Sky over White Sands National Park, New Mexico

And then we came to New Mexico. Wow. It’s also Big Sky Country, and the desert below just emphasizes it. 

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in was the sky—the sky!

 --Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop 

Willa Cather wrote about early days in Santa Fe, and the Bishop's love for the land and sky. Boy, that sentence nailed it. I guess Georgia O’Keeffe thought so, too, because so many of her desert paintings evoke that sense of the massive sky, with the earth as the floor. 

Her early works reflected her frustration with the art world. As we learned when we saw O’KEEFFE!, the one-woman show written and performed by my friend, Lucinda McDermott Piro, she felt her early training only tried to pigeonhole her. When she was teaching in Texas, she began experimenting with abstraction: 

“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at, not merely copy it.” 

Her lover, then husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, seemed to agree, and encouraged her work. By 1929, she felt the need to come to New Mexico to work. 

Sky within sky

In the Art Museum of New Mexico, there’s a marvelous exhibit of paintings by artists when they lived in the East next to their paintings after coming to New Mexico. I find O’Keeffe’s to be quite telling. While my photo of her Lake George painting didn't come out, it was dark and hard to make out the lake and mountains. Arriving in New Mexico, she painted an adobe wall and window, with, of course, the sky above it:

Eventually, after Stieglitz’s death, she moved there. She bought a ranch, where she lived till she died, and collected bones and other “earth objects” which fed her imagination, as they connected with the sky. I guess she will always be “The New Mexico Artist” to me.

O'Keeffe at 90 on her Ghost Ranch