Things still don't make sense to me, but I don't want to talk about it right now, so let's talk about art, specifically Georgia O'Keeffe. (I know, right? You'll see.)
I have always found O'Keeffe's life and work endlessly fascinating. As a person, she had a lot of fantastic ideas and thoughts, I admired equally her technical skill and feisty spirit, and in general, she's been an inspiration to me in every way as a woman artist.
One of my formative experiences as a little girl was seeing an exhibition called One Hundred Flowers at a museum in Hawaii (I wanted to say the Bishop, but I don't think that's accurate). The back-story was that in 1938, O'Keeffe had been invited to Hawaii by an ad agency to paint two pictures of pineapples for the Dole plantation. As she was there as a worker, she wanted to stay with the fieldworkers, but the Dole people refused what would have been an affront to the class distinctions they maintained. O'Keeffe was furious, and in protest left the plantation to work in Maui, sending them paintings of anything in Hawaii except a pineapple. She eventually fulfilled her contract by painting from a pineapple plant sent to her studio in New York, and no one ended up happy with the arrangement. This experience, however, gave rise to what I considered a pretty fantastic collection of flower pictures (though many critics enjoy trashing these) and a lot of great work that incorporated botanical shapes and rhythms.
For years, those paintings were the pinnacle of art for me, and I still find them uniquely beautiful. I had a poster of her Oriental poppy that hung over my desk, and there was another of Jimson weeds in my mom's room, which I stared at every morning while ironing clothes and getting ready for school. I thought long and hard about why I enjoyed them so much, and I eventually came to the sense of elegance. By this, I mean the scientific definition: "gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct."
She used paint in such an exact and controlled way, yet achieved an image of unparalleled beauty and delicacy. The Italian term for it might be sprezzatura. The precision, specificity, and effortlessness she brought were a perfect foil for the untrammeled wildness of nature. She found order in chaotic and frenzied systems and deconstructed the universe into spectacular geometries, units of light and energy, archetypal shapes, and vast infinities brought down to a tangible, human scale of scope and experience. To me, that was positively electrifying.
As I became a painter and thought more about life and the universe, I kept coming back to O'Keeffe's work with different eyes. Throughout undergrad, I was frequently dismissed as being little more than an O'Keeffe imitator, and I recognize that it's impossible to escape that obvious visual parallel with what I do. I think it's good to see her influence, and I took it as a compliment that people could recognize what I was going for. Her work has never been in the realm of tote bags and T-shirts for me, even though I owned my fair share of notecards, journals, and the aforementioned museum posters. She was bigger than being the Most Famous Woman Artist or that lady who paints vaginas. She dealt with so many ideas and themes in science and spirituality, evident throughout her writing and sketches, and in a way I think the extent to which she eventually became accepted by the public actually undermined the real depth and innovation of her work.
When I applied for the art history degree, I was planning to write my thesis on Georgia O'Keeffe. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to write about, but I felt I had some fundamental understanding of the way she thought and painted because I'd spent so many years processing similar ideas in similar ways. Looking back at her historically, I saw even more connections with painters and photographers around her, and in my first semester at Pratt I did a project in an Art Criticism class tracing threads through the Stieglitz circle to what was happening currently in painting (this was in 2005).
Among the ideas in this paper (which was all over the place), I wrote at length about Arthur Dove and American Modernism. Something was happening in American painting in the 1920s and 30s that I consider some of the most interesting in all of art history, but it gets largely ignored as either a lame appropriation of European Modernism, or just some silly decorative stuff that got made before Jackson Pollock came along and became the Messiah of American art.
I proposed a correction to this narrative, bringing in concepts from math, science, psychology and nature, as well as the use of materials, scale, figure/ground relationships, geometry, even color, which would place these paintings in the forefront of relevance regarding present-day society. This is to say, we shouldn't have ignored this stuff because it's a lot of what we need again, and we can learn a lot from what's been done with it already.
I was in no way surprised that most fellow students kind of shrugged off my presentation, since this was par for the course with the MFA program (my professors laughed out loud when I listed Dove and O'Keeffe among my influences instead of, say, Eric Fischl or Matthew Barney). My professor found it fascinating though. He suggested I use it as my application essay to the art history program (which I did), and he said he really hoped they read it, since he knew some professors who could use that perspective in their classes. I was not surprised to read my admission review after I was accepted and see that the reviewer described my paper as being about "Alfred Stieglitz, 1920s," indicating that they most definitely didn't read past the introductory paragraph.
Yesterday I read a NY Times review of what looked to be a great show in Massachusetts calledDove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence (and now you see why I'm talking about this perhaps?). Roberta Smith (whom I endlessly adore, I have to say) delved into the comparisons between Dove and O'Keeffe and came to the same conclusion that I often, begrudgingly, do as well: "When all is balanced, Dove emerges as the weightier painter. The best artists aren't necessarily those with the big-name recognition."
I'm so bummed that I didn't know about this show sooner, since there are a lot of pieces, especially drawings and watercolors, that I haven't seen in person before. (Am still considering the logistics though). I love thinking about these ideas, since they are so personally relevant to me and feel so currently important when compared with, say, patronage in the Italian Renaissance.
I don't necessarily regret the topic I chose for my art history thesis. The typical process for these projects is kind of synthetic: you start by reading everything that's been written on a given artist or topic, then you generate a thesis built on those ideas and hope to find something in the art that supports what you're saying. I have known other art history majors who never saw the paintings they wrote about in person, or who later admitted that they didn't really believe what they said but were able to support and document it well, so they went with it. My process has been the reverse, which has made it equal parts excitingly rewarding and agonizingly frustrating. I started with the paintings themselves, in a room in a museum in Venice, and I noticed a detail that jumped out at me. Once I'd seen it, I couldn't think about anything else, and it started to become an obsession. My research process has been tumultuous because I am digging through piles and piles of seemingly unrelated things, trying to find someone who supports my instinct that what I saw was put there on purpose and means what I think it does.
It's a good project, and it's interesting (sometimes), but I'm ready to throw all my notes out the window and set books on fire, so I should probably wrap it up. In this respect, I'm glad I didn't write on O'Keeffe or the ideas which most influence me as a painter, because I'd never want to get sick of them or consider them drudgery.
I have always been this way. I supplement my education with my own study. Sometimes it's Stephen Hawking, sometimes it's poetry, often it's philosophy or neuroscience, then I go back to art history or literature or ecology. Anything but what I'm "supposed" to be reading at the time. When a friend of mine came to visit, he made fun of the books co-mingling on my bedside stand, and I admitted that the only reasonable conclusion is that I'm a gigantic nerd with attention issues. But damn if it doesn't make for some awesome things to think about while I paint.
