![]() ![]() Georgia O’Keeffe’s In the Patio No IV, 1948. But if I danced all night, I couldn’t paint for three days.” “I first learned to say no when I stopped dancing,” she said. A spell in New York at the Art Students League introduced her to the pleasures of an urban social life, and the concomitant realisation that art would require relinquishment as well as ambition. Her first memory was “of the brightness of the light – brightness all around”, and she resolved to be an artist at the age 11.ĭogged commitment to this ambition got her to the Art Institute of Chicago at 17, but all the same her apprenticeship was long. Born on 15 November 1887, O’Keeffe was the eldest daughter, ministering to a brood of sisters. The family style was cool and austere, setting great store by self-reliance. Her mother had hoped to be a doctor and several aunts never married, instead pursuing independent careers. She was a farm girl first, raised in the wide-open prairies of Wisconsin. “I’ve always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,” she said, “and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” In terms of the radical things she did with paint, never mind the innovations she brought to bear on her private life, she forged a passage to a world of openness and freedom, as frightening as it was exhilarating. How do you make the most of what’s inside you, your talents and desires, when they slam you up against a wall of prejudice, of limiting beliefs about what a woman must be and an artist can do? She didn’t kick the wall down – hardly her style – but instead set her considerable canniness and will at prising a new way through. ![]() The attraction was a mystery, and yet walls and doors figure large in the story of O’Keeffe’s singular life. “It’s a curse the way I feel – I must continually go on with that door.” Flowers excited her with their chambers and contours, their frills and fleshy folds, their potential for abstract form “I’m always trying to paint that door – I never quite get it,” she announced. First she bought the house, a process that took a full decade, and then she set about documenting its enigmatic presence on canvas, creating almost 20 versions. This was the landscape that unlatched her heart, and it was during her time there in the 1930s that she began to obsess over the wall with a door in it, located in the courtyard of a tumbledown farmstead in Abiquiú.
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