#NEW MEXICO SCENERY SERIES#
#NEW MEXICO SCENERY WINDOWS#

Sedlar is a particular admirer of her commitment to growing her own food and eating healthily and in tribute has created an extraordinary Georgia O’Keeffe dinner menu at Eloisa. “There’s a lot of no-nonsense women in New Mexico and O’Keeffe was one of them,” he said. He admitted she could be “mischievous” and “cranky” but remembered her also as a sociable person who held dinner parties for smart people like Andy Warhol and Joni Mitchell. Sedlar’s family is from Abiquiu and his great aunt cooked for O’Keeffe for 15 years, at both Ghost Ranch and the Abiquiu house. There’s a lot to learn.”Īnother person who knew her is the chef John Rivera Sedlar, whom I met the next day in his Santa Fe restaurant, Eloisa. “Her taste was simple and elegant, it never went out of style. “She knew her wealth but it was about what you need,” said Lopez. “I was very shy and she wasn’t a big talker, so we got along very well,” she said, rejecting the image of the stern, ascetic loner you often see in photographs and commending her life and work as an inspiration, especially for young women. The house itself – with thick adobe walls and log-and-stick ceilings – is simply and elegantly decorated, and has a cool, contemplative atmosphere. I was lucky to have as my guide the director of the property, Agapita Lopez, who knew O’Keeffe and indeed became her companion when O’Keeffe turned 87 (the painter died in 1986 aged 98). This home is owned by the O’Keeffe Museum and can be visited on guided tours. In 1945 she bought a second home in the area – at Abiquiu, near the White Place and Bode’s general store – and began to divide her time between it and Ghost Ranch. As I hiked the dry river bed between the heat-reflecting rocks, I felt intrepid Georgia pacing alongside in her loose, monochromatic clothes, with her unsentimental, Modernist eye for shape and colour and her disregard for physical hardship.Ĭredit: Herbert Lotz/Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

But it’s worth making the effort, not just to see the extraordinary rock formations but in order to understand something of how O’Keeffe worked in the field. It is reached by a turning off Highway 84 and few people go there. She called it the White Place, a canyon flanked by concrete-grey cliffs and pinnacles with a melted gothic look. The rain held off for my visit to another location with which she felt a strong affinity. Meanwhile, to the south a storm was brewing over Pedernal, recolouring it in dark purples much as O’Keeffe did with her pigment. There’s almost nowhere else in the world where you can see the artist’s life and work in such a holistic way.”Ĭredit: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Gift of The Burnett FoundationĪs she drove along a dirt road parallel to the “painted desert”, Seebantz kept one eye on the angles and braked as the subject of a work slid into alignment – Gerald’s Tree I, 1937, for instance, a depiction of a fossilised cedar, beneath which the writer and mystic Gerald Heard once danced, against a background of red cliffs.

But exhibition visitors will still be missing half the picture of this visionary artist and personality who was one of the 20th century’s most significant pioneers and exponents of Modernism.įor as Hartley told me: “The museums and galleries are important of course but we really want people to see the landscapes. The show aims to challenge some assumptions about a painter whose Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 was sold in 2014 for $44.4 million, a record for a female artist (naysaying the critics, she said the flowers in her paintings weren’t about eroticism nor the bones about death). Tate Modern’s Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective, which opens on Wednesday, is “absolutely the most important international show that’s happened yet for O’Keeffe”, according to Cody Hartley, the director of curatorial affairs at the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

#NEW MEXICO SCENERY WINDOWS#

“I used to get right up in the morning and start out and stay out all day,” she wrote “the windows were large enough so… I could use a great big canvas.” Many of those great big canvases – of layered limestone cliffs, flat-topped mountains, rock chimneys, and the transformative play of light across them – have now made the journey from Far Away to Bankside in London, along with her enigmatic representations of flowers and animal bones. In the Thirties O’Keeffe had a Model-A Ford that she customised into a mobile studio.

#NEW MEXICO SCENERY SERIES#

Georgia O’Keeffe outdoors with Pelvis Series Red With Yellow, 1960

New mexico scenery