Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)

 - artist and woman to the bittersweet end

Someone who survives typhoid and breast surgery twice and becomes a highly rated artist and potterymaker despite of an eyesight defect caused by the measles must have been destined from birth to become an artist. And so she was, little Georgia, who was raised in cold Wisconsin and who died in her sleep in her beloved New Mexico, almost 100 years later.

When she was only eleven, her parents let her begin a study of art, which lasted five years, and in 1905 she was accepted into the Art Institute of Chicago. She looked like a slim lily, and was later in life called The Lady of the Lily as she painted lilies in watercolour much in the style of jugend decorations (art noveau). Also in these early years of her professional life she did drawings in charcoal. The details in those scented flowerleaves and in the sun`s meeting with waterdrops on the leaves became her inspiration at the time. 

Later her source of inspiration would rather be burning hot deserts, dry sculls of bulls and simple brickbuildings in the southern part of the US and Latin-America. The oil paintings of that period are among the most beautiful she ever created.

Together with her husband, the photographer and artist Alfred Stieglitz, she also painted scyscrapers in the big city giving the impression that the noise of the place vanished under the harmonic strokes of her paintingbrush. Her own inner peace was roughly shaken when she suffered nervous breakdowns and hospitalization midst life. This affected her ability to create art for quite some time. But gradually she managed to work on her easel again. Still life of her hands picking grapes became photoart that gave her husband great recognition. She was proud of her strong, tanned hands, and rightly so. They were to be her comfort in the aging years when her eyesight dropped further: Clay was then to become her material, and she shaped it into beautiful pottery objects. And now she used the inspiration of her memories from all those long travels she had made to Europe, to Japan and to India, to islands in the Pacific and South America. The need to create was still there, and she designed and created almost to the very end of her life. On one of the photos in the book about her, she is captured in profile, ninety years of age, with a goucho hat on her greywhite hair, holding a stick for support in her lovely hands.

Georgia O'Keeffe died in her 99th year, and typical of her was that she was then busy planning the celebration of her 100th birthday with a magnificent retrospective exhibition in The National Art Gallery in Washington D.C. The exhibition turned out a big success, and Georgia probably enjoyed it thoroughly looking down at it all from her heaven…

She inspires me to make pictures with fabrics, and I 'd like to share this influence with others.

Literature: Britta Benke: O'Keeffe ISBN 3-8228-5861-7.

© Quilteposten 2009