"When the Spirit moves Georgia, she can do more
in a day than you can do in a week."
--O'Keeffe's early art teacher Elizabeth Willis 1
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O'Keeffe And Texas
Jan 27 - April 5, 1998
Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
overview by paul soupiset
"I couldn't believe Texas was real. When I arrived out there, there wasn't a blade of green grass or a leaf to be seen, but I was absolutely crazy about it. There wasn't a tree six inches in diameter at that time. For me Texas is the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are."
-Georgia O'Keeffe
The twentieth century fine artist is unique among God's creations -- never before has such description, synthesis and introspection occurred. When the century closes, a handful of painters, photographers and sculptors will remain as its chief examplars, and Georgia O'Keeffe will endure as one of the brightest.
A recent landmark retrospective,"O'Keeffe and Texas," held from January 27 - April 5, 1998 at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. The exhibit focused on the artist's legacy, drawing upon fifty watercolors, oils and drawings primarily from her formative years teaching and living near the Palo Duro Canyon in West Texas.
Known principally as a descriptive painter, O'Keeffe related her world in terms of light, color, geometry, mass and line. To tag her work only by her popular floral studies would be to miss her larger oeuvre, including stark landscapes and amazing descriptive works using primarily line. From those early days painting in Texas, she drew upon the created world around her -- expanding rings of light comprising the sunrise, solids and voids in sedementary rock formations, and graduated colors of the canyon all make their way into O'Keeffe's works.
Landforms, Color, Geometry...
Special #21 (below) exhibits her ability to distill shape and color -- intersecting curves and curvilinear vegetative forms bisect the canvas, describing the Texas panhandle landscape with warm tones. This landform painting is from O'Keeffe's second period in Texas when she worked at the art department at West Texas State Normal College from 1916 to 1918. O'Keeffe would take frequent hikes down into the Palo Duro canyon, making observations and painting the formations around her.
Special #21, 1916 (oil)
Light, Solids, Voids and Line...
Blue & Green Music, 1919
Blue & Green Music (above), much like Evening Star IV (top), highlights O'Keeffe's abstract use of light-as-subject.Varying degrees of abstraction would always accompany her work , but the colors, flat plains, high plateaus and big skies she discovered during her time in Texas became the inspiration of many of her later works. The prarie winds, spiraling smoke and dried bones she found here became the vernacular of her later Santa Fe works.
Black Cross with Red Sky, 1929
1. quoted from O'Keeffe Artist website, http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/okeeffe2.html
2. additional historical background attributed to the McNay Museum,
San Antonio