More on Blue: Georgia O’Keeffe, John Engman

I think the color blue has been on my mind lately because when the sun is out down here in the Southwest, I can’t look at the sky without thinking, Georgia O’Keeffe. And whenever I see a particularly brilliant and complicated shade of blue, I think, Cerulean, Another Shade of Blue, and feel that humorous, bittersweet, and lovely flavor of John Engman’s poetry.

I’m not much of a photographer, to put it mildly, but one blogger I follow, recently quoted the photographer, Timothy Allen, (reblogged just before this post on my site) in a way that has encouraged me to include the snapshot I just took out my current bedroom window.

Indigo, Another Word for Blue

I wanted to capture the contrast between the sky this evening, In the Gloaming (a touching and haunting short story by Alice Elliot Dark), and the lingering white snow precariously attached to the tip of the lowest branch. The color of the snow didn’t make the photo, but the depth of that indigo sky…Another Word for Blue.

It’s killing me that I can’t reproduce John Engman’s poem here on my blog site. But, I keep looking at the copyright page of his book, Temporary Help, and I clearly can’t. Please look it up on the link I included a couple of weeks ago. Besides the slightly dark but delicious humor, the poem has everything to do with what it is to be an artist, and how that feels.

“It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that …”

Art of Quotation

“It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.”

– Timothy Allen, photographer (photograph by Timothy Allen)

---

View original post

O’Keeffe Thoughts at Arches National Park

Broken Arch
Arches National Park
February, 2015

Speaking again of things that words cannot describe (or at least easily) that is how I felt the first time I saw Arches National Park two years ago, and again when we returned earlier this month. So many of the views into the sky through those magnificent arches dramatically resemble Georgia O’Keeffe painting that same blue sky through bleached pelvis bones she picked up while wandering around the New Mexican desert near her homes there.

Pelvis IV, 1944
Georgia O’Keeffe
Minneapolis Institute of Art

But even among her earliest works in color, O’Keeffe painted her view into the sky, and she was already using the circular shapes.

O’Keeffe_EveningStarNo.V1917

She chose her earliest color work, in her own style, to be blue, and the circular, swirling shape was there.

Two Links:

http://accessibleartny.com/index.php/2009/10/georgia-okeeffe-abstraction-at-the-whitney/

http://archive.artsmia.org/circling-around-abstraction/preview-7.html

Decisions: We’re Always Living on the Edge of What’s Next

A young friend was recently invited to sit on an alumni panel at her alma mater. All the panelists are successfully pursuing careers in the creative arts. Undergraduate students majoring in the arts were invited to hear the panelists talk about their successful careers. During the question time at the end, one student asked, But, how do you know when to give up on your dreams?

Wow! By the time I was in elementary school, I was already wondering how people got divided out into the group with the thrilling and interesting lives, and the rest of us with the dreary ones. How, at the point of graduating from college, does a person still think it’s possible to live their dream?

Apparently, two people who heard this story later, laughed and said, Well, that’s easy; it’s when the rent is due. That practical answer leads back to Penelope Fitzgerald, who began writing after her family was raised, and Alice Neel, who pursued her painting in spite of the looming rent. Fitzgerald and Neel’s individual choices fit their own personal lives. Both of those women, now deceased, are well known and respected artists. But, decisions are not easy, and usually not clear either. How was I to know, when I did make the risky jump to expose my creative possibilities not only in public, but to my own self, that anything but disappointment and regret would offer itself?

In the excerpt of Philip Gustin A Life Lived that I linked to a few weeks ago, Gustin says what he was always after was a state of being that he had found. The quote: “All I want to do is stay in that state.”

A Note About Blog Drafts

I just learned something interesting. My post for the first week in February entered into my Site buried beneath the entry for the last week in January, apparently because I began thinking about this entry and making notes in a draft before I wrote last week’s entry. So, scroll down below the cute doggy to see the most recent entry.