For Georgia O’Keeffe Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such

For Georgia O’Keeffe Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such   

By Lenny Lynch

Defiant, independent, no lover of men, boys either as she put it fore-square in her late Victorian high school yearbook (making me wonder if she was not some preternatural Frida Kahlo taking her pleasures where she found them but the severe looks, with that hard-press bun hard-pressed for some eighty years even when covered by “doo rag” or Southwestern ancient from before Gadsden Purchase Spanish don sombrero of a hairpiece done about six ways to severity make me think that she lived for her art and thought about sex through her fleshy vaginal lush flowers de-flowered). And so she went to see William Merritt Chase the godfather of many of her generation. Went to see that famous 1913 Mabel Dodge and the Mayfair swell Amory show which brought modernism to the American shores once the exiles made a stink. Went too a-skimming to that oasis of modernism and protest art politics the Art Student League in New York City then Mecca on the rise as fallen Europe bled by four years or carnage and a millennium of unanswered hurts grudgingly gave way to the New World as the very latest thing in art. Jackson Pollack out in some Wyoming of the mind getting ready to splash his sub-conscious on canvas.  (By the way ASL making me think that it was a popular front invention of those devious American-born Stalinists with their hands deep in the pie but no that institution stands on its own although when you look at the roster from Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollack and beyond it makes you wonder-good wonder, the wonder of Scotty Fitzgerald’s lonesome Dutch sailors as they coursed  Long Island Sound and saw, hell, saw the fresh green breast of a new land. Some landscape out of their Golden Age past all fastious burghers and winter-scape hard-headed ice pond fresh. To wonder and to pity later-okay.         

Hit the town running pushing into old Stieglitz’s workshop, what did he call it oh salon, he onto something about art once the camera took pretty pictures out of an artist’s hands (took praise be ugly pictures too picture old dusty Okies travelling, sideshow geeks, drag queens working too hard to be Miss Judy Garland, gay lovers in secluded closets before the Stonewall wash us clean, holy goofs and con men, things blowing up, things being blown up but mainly the human comedy to make one think that something somewhere went awry) and left the field shattered dumping those picture perfect pantries filled with precise foods, prefect flowers in season or out, and brilliant baskets of fruit, my god, millions of brilliant baskets of fruit, grapes gleaning pearl-like. Maybe from the look of some photograph grabs some explicit stuff which the moral police might have considered naughty when naughty meant the clink, unless you as eternally were connected. No the times, like all times, required something more and Ms. O’Keeffe was showing just a glimmer of that understanding painted the town, painted every skyscraper that was not nailed down and  when she went to upstate New York and painted red, blue, green barns, and the like showing us a new non-idyllic pastoral.      

But forget all that. No, put all that in the past once she headed Western, an Eastern girl born for the West just look at those later photographs of her like some wizen Earth Mother pioneer stock weathered beyond weather come a-blazing to tame the land to her brush. Make desert-forsaken whitened cracked cattle bones and sagebrush come alive in the new dispensation. Made that homestead Ghost Ranch (dude ranch so figure we are close to Professor Turner’s closing of the frontier Clark Gable will do the rest come last of the heroic mold cowboy The Misfits time) come alive with Western-strewn colors all siena brown, mojave yellow, death valley red, granite grey. Did it with some style too, something to look at in big gallery art museum walls. Something to ponder about the very real virtues of living for your art and be damned with the rest. Be damn with the men, boys too.