An episode from 8/17/26: Tonight, we look at the years of intense simplicity that the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) spent in New Mexico. Attached to the area from her first visit to Taos in 1929, over the next fifteen years she continued to travel and paint there. In 1949 she moved to New Mexico permanently and achieved the kind of bare-bones life, seclusion from the wider world, and level of intimacy with the natural world she had long sought.
The books I read from are Laurie Lisle’s biography, Portrait of an Artist, and Georgia O’Keeffe, a large book of reproductions and commentary by O’Keeffe herself.
The paintings of hers that O’Keeffe mentions in the episode are: The Grey Hills (1942) (the painting called Grey Hills 2, which she describes as looking like miles of elephants, is not online); Black Place III (1944), Patio with Black Door (1955), Road Past the View I (1964), and Black Rock with Blue III (1970).
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Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
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