Creative Lives

Becoming inspired by the legend that is Georgia O'Keefe

Something a little different this week as I want to introduce an extra thread into Lens Soup, called Creative Lives. It’s creative inspiration, chats about art and artists of all genres, it’s about looking up from the camera to get inspiration from other places.

A wander round an art gallery, staring at a painting that takes your fancy, is a brilliant way to learn about light and composition. Spending time away from your shutter is a really important way to recharge your creative battery. I’m spending a few days down by the coast in Cornwall, giving me the perfect excuse to start this strand on my Substack.

Painting by Georgia O’Keeffe

This seascape is by Georgia O’Keefe, one of my favourite painters. I love her not just for her art, but also for how she chose to live her life. Born in the late 1800’s, she was an absolute rock star of a woman, a force of nature. She stepped outside of the suffocating expectations that were imposed on so many women of that era, and lived an extraordinary life of independence and creative freedom until the very end. She became famous as a modernist painter, then a photographer, and finally discovered Ceramics in her late 80’s when her failing eyesight meant she could no longer see well enough to paint.

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Dancing to her own tune

• She was one of the most photographed women of the 20th century, the muse of her avant garde photographer husband Alfred Steiglitz, who did a series of more than 300 portraits of her.

• While living in New York she stopped painting the iconic flowers that had made her famous, and painted a series of architectural Manhattan skyscrapers. Later in life, O’Keeffe recalled,

“The men decided they didn’t want me to paint New York . . . They told me to ‘leave New York to the men.’ I was furious!”

• In the summer of 1929, possibly tired of those opinions, she bought her first car and travelled to New Mexico with a friend, the artist Rebecca Strand. She drove around the desert drawing, painting, and camping out under the stars.

• O’Keeffe met the famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams in New Mexico and they traveled through the Southwest and into Yosemite together in 1938-39, with both artists often capturing the same subjects in their work

“No one else has extracted from [the Southwest] such a style and color, or has revealed the essential forms so beautifully as she has in her paintings.” Ansel Adams on Georgia O'Keeffe

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Ceramics

• In 1974, when she was 87 years old and living alone in her secluded studio in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, she hired ceramicist Juan Hamilton to be her driver, gardener, assistant, travel companion, and eventually ceramics tutor. Pottery was the perfect, tactile form that she could feel her way into now that her eyesight had almost left her.

'All the men artists can have young women, but people think it's shocking that I might have a young man in my life,'

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Her Box of Recipes

By the late 70’s she was living a self sufficient life on a ranch in Abiquiú, New Mexico. Something of a disciple of '70s health guru Adele Davis, and always the minimalist, she ground her own flour, made her own yoghurt from the milk of local goats, and grew her own fruits and vegetables. When it became too much to manage on her own, she hired a newly qualified art student to be her private chef and cook for her, using the recipes that O’Keeffe had gathered over her lifetime¹

When O’Keeffe died, Juan Hamilton was the principal beneficiary and sole executor of her $70 million estate. He donated much of it to a foundation in her name, and recently he sold some of her more private possessions in Sotheby’s.

One of the lots was her box of handwritten recipes.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University bought it and it can all be viewed on their online archive.

Scrolling through it, there are a few nods to the Southwest, like green-chile chicken enchiladas, but O'Keeffe took great pride in her healthy lifestyle and a lot of the recipes reflect that. Recipes for Roasted beets, Dandelion Greens, Kale, Avocado Soup would have been considered downright eccentric for a woman living out in the desert in the mid-twentieth century.

Some are written by hand, some typed up and some torn out of a newspaper. They were all kept, often with splatters of food on them, in an alphabetised box.

I found scrolling through the Yale archives of her recipes strangely emotional. Such a normal human thing to do, showing that she was as precise and engaged about her food and how she ate as she was in the other areas of her life. And it makes me love her all the more.

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Photography

• Georgia O’Keeffe was surrounded by photography for most of her life, and her paintings had the sort of attention to detail and composition more regularly used by photographers.

• In the 1940’s after her husband died she became a serious photographer in her own right. Studying with photographer Todd Webb, she often photographed the same subjects she had painted years before.

Inspired

As I’m by the sea this week, I wanted to try and take a shot inspired by her seascape style. I love the symmetry and colour in her reflection painting below.

I took this shot on Gwithian Beach in Cornwall this week, inspired by her composition and style

1. Margaret Wood (her assistant and chef) wrote a book with recipes and personal stories from the years she spent with her called A Painter’s Kitchen.