Georgia O'Keeffe and Radical Creativity

Georgia O’Keefe captured by Joe Munroe

The Abstracted Flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe

Sexual or Spiritual?  

I saw Georgia O’Keeffe's paintings in person for the first time in 1989 in a retrospective of her flowers at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Before that, I would spend time pouring over her books and becoming immersed in the color plates of her works. I was a young art student at the time. I can remember being mesmerized by the seductive way she blended organic folds of pastel colors into vortexes of swirling paint strokes. Her work felt like a direct invitation to enter your own intimate relationship with the power of nature.

It never really mattered to me if the images were meant to be representational or not. I just saw an uncanny ability to teeter that fine line between something slightly recognizable and another worldly mysticism. I can’t say why I wasn’t bothered to read the titles and dimensions of her color plates. I suppose I was too busy taking in her abstract language. 

By the time I walked into her retrospective, I remember my anticipated expectation suddenly turning to deflated disappointment. My assumption was that her work was going to be big. I mean really big. The kind of big where I  they swallow me up by the seductive senses of life itself. 

What I found instead were small to mid-size paintings that required me to take in her work from my head, instead of my body. How else could I dissolve myself into the interconnectedness of the earth- the sky- and self? 

Over time I lost interest in Georgia as I immersed myself in completing my art degree. My naivety at the time left me believing what I was taught:  her flower series were just sexualized motifs made by the subjective mind of a female artist. Eventually, I came to realize this idea of sexualized motifs such as the female sex organ was an exploited desire. Mostly men critics who chose only to see sexuality, thus essentially turning a mirror onto themselves reflecting their shallowness. 

It would take me years to untangle the critical theory I was taught in art school. My interest in spiritual phenomena seemed to be squashed at every turn. I was strongly encouraged to take my subjective reality out of the equation of making art. Emotionalism was seen as weak and something to work against. I was taught to focus more on compositional elements that would speak for themselves. Discussions centered around an intellectual fascination with geometrical ideals through shape and color. 

There seem to be decades in the canon of art where the roots of 19th Century romanticism were buried and replaced with the idea that painting should be self-critical and address only its adherent properties. 

I was taught that spirituality, intuition, and emotional subject matter lacked seriousness in art practice. Not only that, I was accused more than once of dangerously crossing a line into a woo-woo mentality that was considered taboo in the halls of academia.

The exact kind of spirituality that birthed many painting groups in the American modernism of the 20th century.

Painters and artists such as Agnes Pelton, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keefe were directly nourished by Transcendentalism, theosophy, and Eastern mysticism. These artists were inspired by Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s Nature Essays, Kandinsky, particularly his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Rudolph Steiner. These philosophers frontier the process of abstracting the landscape. 

The artists of this time felt it more important to respond to painting through intuition and personal connection rather than explanation.

As Emmerson himself said in his essay on nature: 

Regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance -into who’s secrets a dream may lead us deeper… than a hundred concerted experiments.

When man’s reasoned imagination and affection are stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them… The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers.

They all seemed to grasp and work to articulate through painting the concept that spirit is not in us- we are in it. 

I live in the southwest now.  A place of vast open skies and vistas. A place where Georgia O'Keeffe is known so well. She is rightly crowned the Mother of American Modernism.

Many even call her the forerunner of the feminist art movement. I can now see why.

As a mentor and teacher, I have witnessed over the last decade many women artists coming to the Southwest to pay homage to her. It’s not so much about her paintings, although important, it’s more about the mystique of her rebel spirit. She never wavered or joined the consensus of the changing tides or ideals of her peers. Her unwavering independence in the creation of her paintings is what these women yearn for themselves. Perhaps a little of her will rub off on all of us and we will make no compromises. She has become an icon standing for individualized expression and creativity as the greatest rebellion in existence. 

What I desired for my own art decades ago took years to arrive at the coming back home to the self. I returned to a spiritual practice through my art. However, I might have had it right at the beginning- what I assumed O’Keeffe was searching for in her own work was a complete immersion with nature herself.

Georgia O’Keefe’s words

What I want to be written….I have no definite idea of what it should be — but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living — might say something that a man can’t….

Thank you for reading!

Would love to hear your thoughts on the painter Georgia O’ Keeffe …