What Georgia O’Keeffe still teaches me

Some of the small shell paintings I’ve been making for our show at the Chocolate Church Arts Center in Bath.

When you go from painting small to painting large, you can run into problems. I've been having such fun with my small seashell paintings. But as soon as I tried scaling them up, the paintings just fell flat. Looking at my attempts now, I can see that I hadn't scaled my mark-making up enough, and even the palette was uninspired.

When I find myself repeating the same mistakes I've made before, I try to remember the steps I teach my students.

Georgia O’Keeffe “Clam and Mussel” 1926

I encourage my students to create visual collections of art they like. I find it is easier for them to discover their artistic voice, if we have visual references of the things that resonate for them. In my case, I remembered some older work of mine that had the immediacy I was looking for. In my Wellfleet paintings of a couple of years ago, I had painted the canvases in bold colors, before I started, and I used thicker marks and bolder shapes. This helped, but I also wanted to infuse something new in these pieces.

Georgia O’Keeffe

As I was considering what might be the missing ingredient, I remembered Georgia O'Keeffe. O'Keeffe is one of my first art heroes. I met her in a filmstrip in elementary school. She's on many mugs, mousepads and posters, but her bold and colorful paintings still have power for me. I’m not aiming to paint like Georgia O'Keeffe. But I want my paintings to have the vitality I feel when I look at her work.

So, I looked her up, and wouldn't you know she famously painted quite a few clam shells. And, what's more, she painted them in York Beach, Maine! They're smooth and curved, delicate and powerful.

In her seashell paintings, O'Keeffe eliminated texture and rough edges. She limited her palette and minimized the visibility of brush strokes. She used soft blending and sharp edges with very few lines between objects. Backgrounds are simplified or eliminated.

I spent some time just looking at her clam paintings. Eventually, I could see what I might integrate from her work. Like O’Keeffe, I simplify the surface of the shell, but where she is all restraint and subtle gradations, I wanted to use juicy brush strokes like the ones I had used in my landscapes. Her use of contrast and simplified shapes creates a modern semi-abstract sensibility.

It pains me to even show the painting on the left. It lacks confidence, and I’ve completely lost the light. The painting on the right was done after looking at O’Keeffe’s work, noting her attention to light, and her modernist approach to shape and form.

Revisiting O'Keeffe's paintings helped me to identify the aesthetic I was working toward, both what I want to emulate, and what makes my work my own.

I like when shapes and colors become a bit abstract. My larger paintings were losing their abstraction and relying too heavily on being a picture of a thing. The compositions operated differently when I changed the scale of the canvas. So, now I tried zooming in on the images to restore the sense of intimacy. This is a technique O'Keeffe pioneered in her compositions. By getting even closer to the shells, I could take the viewer very close to the subject. I intensified some of the colors and heightened the contrast.

I’m eager to push this learning to even larger canvases. I suspect they will become more abstract. Because of my visual research into her work, I’ve also begun listening to a biography of O’Keeffe. I am enjoying the author Laurie Lisle’s focus on O’Keeffe’s visual education. She describes the lessons O’Keeffe emulated, and the things she eventually left behind so she could discover her own artistic voice.

Going back to a master to try to understand their virtuosity is humbling as well as nourishing. Discovering, honing and expanding one’s creative voice is the work of a lifetime.