Georgia O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin in 1887. She passed away a year before turning a hundred years old, largely dismissed as an eccentric. No matter where she was in her career, she was derided for being too experimental for traditionalists and too cohesive, for the avant garde. I’m not really drawn to her paintings. In her lifetime, most critics considered her work ‘silly’ or ‘girly,’ a painter only of ‘female genital organs,’ especially after she left the mostly masculine art scene in New York City for New Mexico to live where she felt she needed to be, to make her art. Her first solo show occurred the year that followed her death. The organisers had been planning it for years ahead of then but unfortunately, she wasn’t able to live long enough to make it to its opening. My great grandmother though, who when she was alive owned a small art gallery, took her granddaughter to that show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and bought a poster from it she had framed. And because my mother is a hoarder and refuses to throw anything away, it’s attached to the wall next to where my desk is located, from where I’m writing this. So I’ve looked at this painting for hours by now. A second one day but six minutes the next, as I sip coffee or maybe even four hours in silence, on days when I can’t come up with anything to do with empty time. She is now, as so many who flee respectability are, only after their death, considered a ‘genius.’ In her case, a founder of American modernism, most famous for her renderings of abstract landscapes. I’m now really drawn to her paintings.
