How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo

to no frills.
    You do not need a new laptop. You do not need to update your software. Whatever app you think you need, you don’t. You don’t need an iPad, or an i-anything, for that matter. You don’t need to clean your study. You don’t even need a study. You don’t need a secluded cabin in the woods. You don’t need a better chair. You don’t need the best hours of the day. You don’t need big ideas, or even any ideas.
    Georgia abandoned color. She’d been working in watercolor and hated the result. At her tenth attempt to capture one flower she wrote to Anita, speaking in the voice of the painting: “Am I Not Deliciously Ugly and Unbalanced.”
    Georgia abandoned painting. She went back to charcoal, a humble and impossible material. She unrolled cheap manila paper on the floor and had at it, late at night, after she was done teaching, tramping, and letter-writing. She wrote to Anita that she developed bad cramps in her feet from crawling around the floor. She worried that she was going insane, just drawing what she felt without censoring herself. Anita responded that she shouldn’t worry—that Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin were all “raving lunatics.” She embodied the wisdom I heard somewhere once, that to create something meaningful you must love the expression of your heart more than you love yourself.

    * Thought to be the oldest statue of the female form, dated 24,000 BCE–22,000 BCE. With her bad posture, back fat, huge boobs and belly, Venus makes you wish you could afford a personal Pilates instructor or lived 23,000 years ago, when such a figure was believed to be a thing of great beauty.
    â€  There is no other kind.
    â€¡ Ed Harris!
    Â§ A personal favorite, I visit this painting every time I go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I also recommend the gift shop, which has an eclectic selection of art books, notebooks, and witty erasers.
    Â¶ Red Canna (1923).
    ** Loose pencil drawings of naked ladies, their limbs akimbo. Shocking on several fronts: the casual approach, the open legs, etc.
    â€ â€  Seven years younger than O’Keeffe, Pollitzer was small, dimpled, sparkly-eyed, enthusiastic, and cute as a damn button.
    â€¡â€¡ I can just see the ghost imprint of the second charcoal drawing on the backside of the first.
    Â§Â§ What? She put them on the floor, where they were stepped on along with the discarded Playbills and dirty tissues?
    Â¶Â¶ It was Janet Malcolm, fearless journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker, who’s made a career of writing books that piss people off (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer , etc.).
    *** English writer guy famous in his time, now only read by PhD candidates.
    â€ â€ â€  We will forgive her for this somewhat trite phrase, written in a letter to Anita Pollitzer. She was in love!

Georgia O’Keeffe
    American (1887–1986)
Blue Line, 1919
Oil on canvas, 20 1 ⁄ 8 x 17 1 ⁄ 8
    Gift of the Burnett Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
Photograph by Malcolm Varon, 2001
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe/Art Resource, NY

5

    EMBRACE

    As I came up the street into the sunset after supper—I wondered—can I stand it—the terrible fineness and beauty of the intensity of you—
    May 1916. World War I raged in Europe; Albert Einstein had just presented his General Theory of Relativity in Berlin; the formula for Coca-Cola was being readied for market; and Georgia had returned to New York, where she was enrolled in an art methods class at Teachers College.
    In January, days after Stieglitz had discovered her strange and moving charcoal Specials, Georgia had received a teaching offer from R. B. Cousins, president of the West Texas Normal College. Cousins asked her to head their art department with the proviso that she complete the required methods class at