O'keeffes's Long Week End

O'keeffe's Bones, oil on masonite, 16" x 14.5", Steven Rhude


"I would have been willing to stay on in Canada if it hadn't been so terribly cold," she declared.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/georgia-o-keeffe-exhibit-examines-modern-art-pioneer-in-global-context-1.4076250

No doubt about it, Georgia O'keeffe was not only one of the best modern painters of her time, but also a warm weather gal. Out of her element when it came to Canada, with it's climatic warehouse of cold fronts claimed by American weather millenarianists, to be regularly exported down to the mid western states, eastern seaboard, and further, surely to disrupt their Edenic enterprise prior to the second coming, Georgia was having nothing to do with this, or cold weather repentance. She wanted warmth and dry bones. 

Notwithstanding the surreal popularity of her landscapes and flowers, it was her bones that did it for this snowlander. The idea of a bleached artifact isolating through it's cavity the graphic solidity of a New Mexico sky, or the idea of a ghost ranch where bones were scattered in one's yard, or where "Ghost Ranch folks replaced the pump on her well" [1], just made the O'keeffe myth grow tenfold for me, as her work continued to address the nature of space and development in America.

It's good to see Georgia back on Canadian soil. Our apologies for the weather.

[1] https://www.ghostranch.org/explore/georgia-okeeffe/

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

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