| Artist: | O'Keeffe, Georgia |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Jack-in-the Pulpit No. III | |
| Date of Work: | 1930 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Biomorphic Abstraction | |
| Movement: | American Abstraction | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: flower painting, but O'Keeffe redefines the genre. Unlike traditional flower painting with its symbolism of nature's passing or its "safe subject" status, she abstracts the flower through scale and close-up until its forms fill the entire space with an allover pattern. She uses the flower not only to fill the space with shape, but also to speak abstractly of the body as something lived in rather than as an object viewed by an outside gaze. The flower becomes both landscape and bodyscape, referencing the "inner haptic" (interiorized body experiences). For O'Keeffe, the hidden drama of nature is not the underlying grid but a spiral or aura that radiates outward with a biomorphic rhythm from an inner mystical core. Style: "I look at nature and I see shapes." Her shapes unfold in a biomorphic way, with a curving contour that may be hard-edged in its clarity of vision, but not geometric in form. Her biomorphic forms are more metamorphic, suggesting growth and regeneration, as well as body metaphors. The movement here in this series based on the Jack-in-the-Pulpit will be inward, into the flower, with a latent referencing of the sexualized body. O'Keeffe's work is at once both representational and abstract. Context: O'Keeffe is arguably the first American to develop an abstracting style that was not directly derived from European models. She gives us a home-grown abstraction that comes from a close observation of nature rather than from fantasy. But what she paints is a world that did not exist before she painted it; in other words, she paints a personal vision more than a thing or object. And in the process she reveals new edges of vision, like this macro view of nature (perhaps inspired by camera visioin). Like Mondrian, her image is not an illusionistic image of surface appearances, but an abstracted vision of the mystical inner construction of nature. Her abstract vision is less concerned with universals, though, and more engaged with the personal and unique moments of nature. For her nature is seen as abstract shapes and "felt" as interiorized body experiences (the "inner haptic"). | ||
