How do artists work? As much as the creative process is a mystery, really, that’s what people often want to know. Even when artists don’t know themselves.
But they leave traces, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe has been mining the photographs, drawings, rocks, bones, artifacts, paints, brushes and other materials O’Keeffe left behind when she died in 1986.
Its new O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials, which opens on Friday, aims to shed light on both her technical and creative processes — a great idea, except for one qualm I have.
The show’s billing quotes O’Keeffe:
I have picked flowers where I found them, have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked. When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.
O’Keeffe was very organized. She placed her drawings in named file folders, took photographs of her still subjects from many vantage points in different light, trimmed her brushed meticulously, and so on. Associate curator Carolyn Kastner, who organized the show, told the Associated Press that she looked hard for something “messy,” but could not find a thing. (Here’s a link to the AP story.)
I’m all for these kinds of shows; they engage people in a different way than a traditional exhibition, and that can draw new people to look at art.
But back to my qualm. There could be a slight downside in this one: already, O’Keeffe’s life story is what so many people know, her steamy affair with a married man, the marriage, the breakup, the sexual allusions in her art that she fought, and so on — even more than the aesthetics of her art in some cases. If this show reinforces that interest in her life, over her art (and I’m not saying it will, for sure), that would be a shame.
Photo Credit: Courtesy the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum