O’Keeffe

It is important to have your own voice as an artist. That means that the paintings I make are definitely mine without doubt. Style comes automatically after mastering the basic knowledge of shape and color. It took me a very long time to master my craft because I am a perfectionist and I do not have a formal education in painting and drawing. Making a living came first and somehow I had to find extra time to teach myself to paint. It never came to a development of style.

                     During the thirty years that I have built my life as an artist, I have not always been painting. I did not want to be influenced by other artists before I was ready, in protection of my authenticity. I wanted to introduce other artists into my life as they would come naturally by meeting them, talking to them, learning profoundly about what they had to say and why they would enter my space at that particular time in my career.

                    I was not even planning to go visit my friends in Colorado but somehow this seemed to be the only time in our life that all the odds were right for a couple of days in the fresh air of the mountains. I was happy that my friend took the trouble to pick me up in Albuquerque. As we drove off north he told me he would treat me to the tourist route to their cabin. We skimmed Santa Fe and took a left turn in Espanola. I could not see much of the famous enchantment everybody was raving about. It all looked rather poor and dry to me. I did like the softness of the adobe houses, a style that was even continued in the big casinos and blended beautifully with nature. After an hour we had left civilization far behind us and it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. Now and than a car passed us, sometimes we drove in a little convoy behind a slow pick-up truck.

                   Late in the afternoon an impressive rock formation lit up red and orange in a pronounced shape. It took me completely by surprise and the feeling of such landscape was overwhelming. As I am constantly looking for places to paint, places to set up camp for a while and make a series of landscape paintings, I thought this was a unique kind of setting. The rocks would change dramatically as the sun went down and reveal an everlasting transformation of shapes and colors. A painter at heart could not feel bored being there. We passed a ranch, named Ghost Ranch. It was a place that I could see myself take a room and board for a couple of months when my host said, I think that is where Georgia O’Keeffe used to hang out.

                    This intrigued me because I thought places of famous painters would be destroyed by tourism, new buildings, hotels and summer camps. Her name was connected with Taos and Santa Fe but not the desert. The Ghost Ranch looked well maintained but extremely modest and almost invisible from the road. Georgia O’Keeffe herself missed it the first time she set out to find it. I was ignorant of its existence but found it nevertheless. The discovery was not a big deal for my host who was tired of hearing about the fame of Georgia O’Keeffe connected to the area. Any body who can pick up a brush can paint flowers as she did. She is famous for her flowers and not her rock paintings. Many amateurs copy her work and proudly present it as being their own. Even the artist’s sister copied her, had successful shows and trashed a good relationship for years. I never was impressed with her art as I struggled to get my own world in perspective and not hers.

                        The next day my friend and I drove back to the same place to get acquainted with the glimpse of something special that was deeply felt the night before. Normally there is hardly anything inspiring about a dead artist’s workplace. It simply consists of four walls and some windows. Art is born in the dark and no working method or place can reveal its mystery. This was different. Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio was the desert with the rock formations at the end of it, unchanged through the years and still inspiring. A hot dry wind blew through the adobe buildings, a courtyard, a museum of natural history and moved leaves of some sparse trees. A certain immense silence hung over us as if we were in a Cathedral.

                     With the book “Full Bloom”, a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, I met a new friend. With her a new world opened as the world of a fellow traveler in a still hostile environment. Although many biographies contain too many boring facts, too many names of people, I could read between the lines and discovered similarities in our struggle, joy and sense of privilege that comes with living the life of a professional painter.

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