Georgia on Our Minds

Georgia on Our Minds

 

Georgia O’Keeffe – American Artist –  November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986

Georgia O’Keeffe is considered one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century.

She is best known for her flower canvases seen in close range and her southwestern landscapes.

 Hibiscus with Plumeria, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1939, oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches

Artist and painter Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She started making art at a young age and went to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1900s. Later, she lived and studied in New York City, the center of American art world, and studied at the Art Students League there.

She was unsatisfied with her art education, and thought she would never stand out as an artist trying to imitate reality the way she was trained. She did not paint for four years, and worked as a commercial artist and later as an art teacher.

She was inspired to paint again in 1912, when she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, where she was introduced to the ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist’s personal ideas and feelings, and that this could best be done putting together arrangements of line, color, and shading, and not trying to “copy” something in the outside world.

Blue Flower, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, Pastel on paper mounted on cardboard, 20 × 16 inches

Dow’s ideas offered O’Keeffe an alternative to the realistic style she had been taught, and she experimented with them for two years, while she was either teaching art in the Amarillo, Texas public schools. When O’Keeffe was teaching art at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina, she decided to test Dow’s theories.

Wanting to find a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, O’Keeffe began series of abstract drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. Abstract art uses elements like line, color and shape as a vehicle of  the artist’s expression. Abstract art doesn’t have to look just like something we see in the outside world.

Sunset, Long Island, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1939, oil on canvas board, 10 x 14 inches

O’Keeffe mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the famous photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz.  Stieglitz gave O’Keeffe her first gallery show at his “291 Gallery” in New York City in 1916 and she married him in 1924. He was 54, she was 31. It was not an easy marriage, and she spent much time away from him, in New Mexico.

Black Mesa Landscape, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1930, Oil on canvas mounted on board, 24 1/4” x 36 1/4 inches

After frequently visiting New Mexico since the late 1920s, O’Keeffe moved there for good in 1946 after Stieglitz died. She often painted the rugged and rocky New Mexican  landscape  which she loved. She had the ability to capture the natural beauty of northern New Mexico desert and mountains in her art.

O’Keeffe died on March 6, 1986, at 98 years old in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Perennially popular, her works can be seen at museums around the world as well as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Passion of Frida Kahlo

The Passion of Frida Kahlo

Today I taught about the extraordinary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to teenagers, in conjunction with a lesson about color, acrylic painting, and self-portraits. Last week they had learned about color mixing, and painted the color wheel, some of them for the first time. They played with mixing colors, discovering (I hope)  some of their personal color tastes and preferences, and feelings for color as they used the primaries to mix the secondaries, the primaries and secondaries to create the tertiaries, and use white to create tints.

All this was partially in preparation for painting today, inspired by Frida. The students used a photograph of themselves as a starting point, and painted around it, and “into it” (over it, if they so chose), and they will work on these and hopefully complete them next week.  Preparing for this class brought me into contact with the work and life of Frida Kahlo…not for the first time…and then trying to communicate about her to the students.  I thought I would share as bit of her work, life and  spirit with You.

‘Frida in Coyoacán’, 1939 (photograph by Nickolas Muray)

Frida Kahlo de Rivera ,  born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, was a Mexican painter  who is best known for her self-portraits: her paintings of herself.

“The Frame” (“Le Cadre”), 1937-38, oil on aluminum and glass

Some have called her the world’s most famous female painter. She was also a political activist and legend in her own lifetime and beyond, an extraordinary and unique personality who took what Life dealt her, and rewove it into passionate, lyrical and unforgettable works that continued to be treasured today. She left the world a unique treasure: her works a painted diary. She revealed her inner and outer life with passion, courage and visual  poetry filled with color and magic.

“Self-Portrait with Bonito”, 1941, oil on canvas

Frida Kahlo’s life began and ended in the same, now famous, house. She was born in 1907 in the  Colonia del Carmen neighborhood of Coyoacan, Mexico City, and died in 1954 in her family home, La Casa Azul, the Blue House,  now the Frida Kahlo Museum.

La Casa Azul, (The Blue House)

Frida Kahlo survived numerous challenges both physical and emotional in her life, including contracting polio as a child, a long recovery from a serious bus accident, and two tempestuous marriages to and divorces from  painter Diego Rivera. She mined these experiences, as well as her strong feelings about her Mexican identity,  politics and cultural influences to create highly evocative and personal paintings that communicate universal human feelings and experiences..

At the age of six, she was stricken with polio. It affected her right leg. She spent nine months in bed.

She studied in Mexico City at the National Preparatory School. She planned to become a doctor, but an almost fatal bus accident at the age of 18 changed her life forever. Following her accident she began painting intensely. Perhaps best known for her self-portraits, Kahlo’s work is remembered for its “pain and passion”, and its intense, vibrant colors.

‘Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird‘,
1940 (oil on canvas)

She produced 143 paintings, 55 of which are self-portraits. When asked why she painted so many self-portraits, Frida replied: “Because I am so often alone….because I am the subject I know best.”

A strikingly handsome woman, the Frida was known to stop traffic in San Francisco, New York and Paris in her long traditional Mexican dresses, her hair braided  with ribbons and flowers to identify with her indigenous Mexican culture. Frida dressed this way throughout her adult life, partly to hide a shorter right leg caused by childhood polio.

Frida in one of her traditional Mexican outfits

Frida Kahlo used personal symbols to express her feelings in her paintings.  Though some have labeled her art as Naïve art or folk art, Surrealism or Magic Realism, she considered her art to be realistic.  Each self-portrait captures aspects of her feelings, and her life experience.  In the style of “Magic, or Magical Realism”, magical elements are presented as a natural part of an otherwise realistic environment.

‘Self Portrait’, 1940, (oil on board)

Frida lived her life to the fullest, despite immense pain,challenges, and suffering. She had a gift for communicating her emotions to the world through painting. Her paintings are beautiful, often heartbreaking works, and are uniquely her style. Yet she was an amazing woman in her own right, for what she has endured, how she persevered, and how she remains an  inspiration and example of strength. She said,

“I am not sick. I am broken.
But I am happy as long as I can paint.”

Unforgettable Frida

She died on July 13, 1954 of a blockage in her lungs at age 47.