| Artist: | O'Keeffe, Georgia |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | From the Faraway Nearby | |
| Date of Work: | 1937 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Biomorphic Abstraction with surreal overtones | |
| Movement: | American Abstraction | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: animal skull set in the southwest desert. O'Keeffe never felt these pictures of skulls were about death; she claimed such bones looked very lively to her. O'Keeffe clearly liked the complexity of shape she found in these skull bones. The strange, hypnotic clarity of the scene coupled with the mysterious shift in scale suggested by the picture's title go beyond the material world to suggest a more metaphysical reality that borders on the surreal. Style: "I look at nature and I see shapes." Her shapes unfold in a biomorphic way, with a curving, animated 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 forms. O'Keeffe's work is at once both representational and abstract; in these later southwest scenes of the animal skulls, her painting also pushes toward the surreal. 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, though these later southwest images take on a surrealist overtone. 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 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"). | ||
