On our drive up to Heron Lake, as well as on the way home, we spent some time exploring the Village of Abiquiu, New Mexico. I have always wanted to explore this area of New Mexico, because of my fascination and infatuation with the famous artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who once called it home. I have a few prints of some of her paintings on my wall and, over the years, have enjoyed attending museums that showcase her art.
Ranchman John and I have even discussed the idea of looking for land to retire in the area of Abiquiu one day.
And finally after 18 years of living in my beloved New Mexico, I finally had the opportunity to walk in some of the same places that inspired her artistic creativity, while visiting the breathtakingly beautiful Georgia O’Keeffe Country.
(View of Pedernal from Ghost Ranch)
The following post is quite lengthy, but I hope some of you will still read it, because I have thoroughly enjoyed organizing some of the key points surrounding this amazing woman’s biography. And along the way, have learned many new aspects about her life and death.
(NOTE: All Photos Watermarked with Laughing Orca Ranch were taken by me with my Canon Powershot SX110 IS. All other photos are borrowed from the Internet)
If you have 10 minutes, you won’t regret watching the video below of a 92 year old Georgia O’Keeffe, being interviewed at her home at Ghost Ranch.
The scenery is beautiful and I was enthralled to listen to her voice and hear her fascinating stories, especially how she chose New Mexico to be her home. I had to laugh at the differences of the times back then when the interviewer asked Georgia if she had a hard time convincing her husband Alfred, who rarely ever left New York, that she was going to New Mexico. I think the interviewer, a female, was so surprised by Georgia’s response that she didn’t even know what to say! Georgia’s response was refreshing and bold and I admire her so much for that.
I only wish I had had the opportunity to meet her, but she died when I was 20 years old, when art and artists were not a huge interest for me. And I didn’t know much at all about New Mexico either.
But interestingly enough, just two years after Georgia O’Keeffe died, I moved to New Mexico with my husband and we began our lives in this beautiful Land of Enchantment.
Watch this. You won’t regret it.
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Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist, born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, before any women artists were well known or highly celebrated. Within a decade, she had distinguished herself as one of America's most important modern artists, a position she maintained throughout her life. As a result, O’Keeffe not only carved out a significant place for women painters in an area of the American art community that had been exclusive to and is still dominated by men, but also she had become one of America’s most celebrated cultural icons well before her death at age 98 in 1986.
Her abstract imagery of the 1910s and early 1920s is among the most innovative of any work produced in the period by American artists. She revolutionized the tradition of flower painting in the 1920s by making large-format paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a magnifying lens.
And her depictions of New York buildings, most of which date from the same decade, have been recognized as among the most compelling of any paintings of the modern city.
Beginning in 1929, when she first began working part of the year in Northern New Mexico—which she made her permanent home in 1949—O’Keeffe depicted subjects specific to that area.
(Like her beloved Pedernal)
"It's my private mountain, It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it." ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
In my opinion, one of most challenging aspects of creating art depicting desert scenes is revealing the beauty, the spirituality, the vastness, and the extreme harshness of this place. Because O’keeffe called New Mexico her home and immersed herself within it’s beauty, she carried out that challenging task creatively well.
Through paintings of its unique landscape vistas, adobe buildings, cultural objects, and the bones, skulls and rocks she collected from the desert floor, she ultimately laid claim to this area of the American Southwest, which earlier had been celebrated primarily by male artists; the area around where she worked and lived has become known as “O’Keeffe Country."
Late in 1932, O'Keeffe suffered a nervous breakdown that was brought on, in part, because she was unable to complete a Radio City Music Hall mural project that had fallen behind schedule. She was hospitalized in early 1933 and did not paint again until January 1934. In the spring of 1933 and 1934, O'Keeffe recuperated in Bermuda, and she returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934. In August of that year, she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiu, for the first time and decided immediately to live there.
In 1940, she purchased a house on the ranch property. The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes. In 1977, O'Keeffe wrote: "the cliffs over there are almost painted for you -- you think -- until you try to paint them."
(We also visited Plaza Blanca on Sunday and were blown away by it’s beauty and the difficulty it must be to capture that beauty with oil paint.)
From her first world travels in the late 1950s, O'Keeffe produced an extensive series of paintings of clouds, such as Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963. These were inspired by her views from the windows of airplanes.
(This painting was my first real introduction to Georgia O’Keeffe when I saw it on a wall in the Chicago Museum of Art 15 years ago. It was HUGE, over 20 feet tall and 40 feet wide! I was entranced.)
Among some of the more now famous guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet
She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained: "Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the 'Faraway'. It is a place I have painted before . . even now I must do it again."
She met photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1916 after which he organized O'Keeffe's first solo show, in April 1917, which included oil paintings and watercolors completed in Texas.
(This is one of my favorite paintings, and I have a print of it on my wall)
One of the most important things that O'Keeffe provided for Stieglitz was the muse he had always wanted. He photographed O'Keeffe obsessively between 1918 and 1925 in what was the most prolific period in his entire life.
During this period he produced more than 350 mounted prints of O'Keeffe that portrayed a wide range of her character, moods and beauty.
He shot many close-up studies of parts of her body, especially her hands either isolated by themselves or near her face or hair.
(Georgia O’Keeffe had a fondness and fascination with bones, especially skulls, as do many of us who call New Mexico home. The starkness of the bleached white bones along with the angles and curves of the bone make them interesting to paint, photograph, and collect. There is also that aspect of a creatures soul and it’s body left behind that is appealing, too. The strength of these photos is that, as O'Keeffe biographer Roxanna Robinson points out, her "personality was crucial to these photographs; it was this, as much as her body, that Stieglitz was recording." They remain one of the most dynamic and intimate records of a single individual in the history of art.
In 1924 Stieglitz's divorce was finally approved by a judge, and within four months he and O'Keeffe married. It was a small, private ceremony and there was no reception, festivities or honeymoon. O'Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz's daughter Kitty, who at that time was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations. The marriage did not seem to have any immediate effect on either Stieglitz or O'Keeffe; they both continued working on their individual projects as they had before.
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe continued to live together most of the time, although she would go off on her own from time to time. She was relatively free-spirited and out-going with Stieglitz and his friends, but she needed solitude for weeks or months at a time when she focused on painting or creating. This arrangement worked well with Stieglitz's own lifestyle, and he used the times when she was away to concentrate on his photography and on his continued promotion of modern art.
(Georgia is not as well known for her city scenes from her early years living in New York, but they are quite impressive, too)
In the coming years O'Keeffe would spend much of her time painting in New Mexico, while Stieglitz rarely left New York except for summers at Lake George. O'Keeffe later said "Stieglitz was a hypochondriac and couldn't be more than 50 miles from a doctor."
Georgia O’keeffe would often withdraw from the limelight...tending her garden at the Abiquiu home and travelling to Mexico, South America, Europe, and Asia...often in the spring when the dust storms were so prevalent in New Mexico. When asked why she travelled so much, she would say that she wanted to see if she lived in the right place.
Shortly after O'Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She immediately flew to New York to be with him. He died on July 13, 1946. She took his ashes to Lake George. She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and then moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949.
Eight of the nine highest prices ever paid at auction for Stieglitz photographs are images of Georgia O'Keeffe. At an auction, Georgia O'Keeffe Nude, a 1919 print by Stieglitz, sold for $1.36 million.
The highest-priced photograph, a 1919 palladium print of Georgia O'Keeffe (Hands), realized $1.47 million at auction in February 2006.
(This photograph was turned into a hand-carved stamp by a fellow letterboxer, for a letterbox that we found while hiking at Plaza Blanca. Here is that image in my Letterboxing Logbook)
In 1972, O'Keeffe's eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, leading to the loss of central vision and leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972, but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.
Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her ranch house in 1973 looking for work. She hired him for a few odd jobs and soon employed him full time. He became her closest confidante, companion, and business manager until her death. Hamilton taught O'Keeffe to work with clay, and working with assistance, she produced clay pots and a series of works in watercolor.
The ranch gate and dirt road leading into Ghost Ranch.
In 1976, she wrote a book about her art and allowed a film to be made about her in 1977. On January 10, 1977, President Gerald R. Ford presented O'Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American citizens. In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
O'Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late 90s. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. In accordance with her wishes, she was cremated and her ashes were scattered to the wind at the top of the Pedernal Mountain, over her beloved "faraway"
(Photo taken of the view of Pedernal and Abiquiu Lake, as seen from within Ghost Ranch)
Following her death, a substantial part of her estate's assets were transferred to the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, which dissolved in 2006, leaving these assets to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum established in Santa Fe in 1997 to perpetuate O'Keeffe's artistic legacy.
(A Tour of Ghost House)
(Inside Ghost House)
(Dining Room)
(Front Door)
(Living Room Window)
(Bathroom Skylight)
(Also found on the wall inside the Ghost House Bathroom)
(Skull over Front Door)
These assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiu house, library, and property.
The Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiu was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 and is now owned by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico..
(Ghost Ranch Cabin with Pedernal and Abiquiu Lake in background)
In 2006, a fossilized species of archosaur was named after O'Keeffe. Blocks originally quarried in 1947 and 1948 near O'Keeffe's home at Ghost Ranch were opened fifty years after being collected. The fossil strongly resembles ornithomimid dinosaurs, but are actually more closely related to crocodiles.
The specimen was named Effigia okeeffeae ("O'Keeffe's Ghost") in January 2006, "in honor of Georgia O'Keeffe for her numerous paintings of the badlands at Ghost Ranch and her interest in the Coelophysis Quarry when it was discovered". There is a museum at Ghost Ranch that can be visited, and it includes those fossils that were discovered on her land. We didn’t have time during our visit to go inside, but will make plans during our next visit.
(Red Cliffs of O’Keeffe Country)
(Ghost Ranch Burros)
(Meeting of the Minds at Ghost Ranch)
“When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore...unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone." ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
While searching for a letterbox near a picnic area above the town of Abiquiu, we stumbled upon a bleached desert skull to take home as a keepsake from our visit. A gift from Georgia O’Keeffe, perhaps?
To honor her, I set up the skull in an artistic pose. Maybe I will paint this skull myself someday…….
