Julie Farstad, Associate Professor of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute
Born on a farm in the Wisconsin prairie and eventually finding her true home in the semiarid valleys and mesas of New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe marveled at the awe she felt in the natural world and spent her life trying to create paintings that embodied that wonderment. Her dynamic compositions of saturated color and surprising scale subverted European conventions of landscape and still-life painting that boasted the spoils of wealth and colonization. Through her phenomenological paintings of nature, O'Keeffe challenged the empirical, human-centered hierarchies imposed upon nature, instead inventing a visual lexicon of awe.
Georgia O'Keeffe was not painting sexual metaphors. O'Keeffe disdained that interpretation, which emerged from a generation of art critics who were enamored with Freudian theories and couldn't imagine that a woman, who was free enough to pose nude for publicly exhibited photographs, could be anything other than some kind of vixen. She thought that the sexualized interpretation of her work said much more about the minds of those writers than her own. As for her own mind, O'Keeffe once said, “Where I come from, the earth means everything.” She wanted to communicate the profound liveliness with which each natural being hums, selecting the most essential forms to create a work of art that confronts, disorients, and thrills. O'Keeffe defined art as “filling space in a beautiful way.” A painting, like an ecosystem, is all about the complex relationships between interdependent parts within a region, and O'Keeffe was inspired by the way the elements of design (line, shape, value, color, form, texture, and space) can endlessly interact and recombine to create a sense of vitality on a two-dimensional surface.
In Sunrise, 1916, washes of saturated yellow, magenta, and red watercolor softly bleed into each other while two delicate, white lines of bare paper define the horizon and the arc of the emerging sun. More than depicting a sunrise, this painting evokes the spectacular phenomenon of sunlight permeating the world. The wet-into-wet painting technique suggests the ephemeral transition from darkness into light as the stark lines punctuate the monumentality of the event. In On the River I, ca. 1965, the viewer peers up past three striated, warm brown cliffs toward a warped, triangular shape of peach-colored sky. As the large, hard-edged sky advances toward the viewer, and the darker rock forms bleed off the edges, the viewer is humbled and disoriented. In this way, O'Keeffe shifts the focus of landscape painting from the predictable forms of mountain and sky to the embodiment of the phenomenon of being entangled in nature. Subjects in O'Keeffe's works continuously teeter between flower and flowering, sunrise and sun rising. By hovering between object and verb, Georgia O'Keefe redefined the beautiful from that which is pleasing to that which is vital.
About the author:
Julie Farstad is an artist and Associate Professor of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. Born and raised in Elmira, New York, Farstad earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Notre Dame and an MFA in Painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work is represented by Byron Cohen Gallery in Kansas City and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago. She was awarded a residency at The Studios Inc in Kansas City in 2010 and her work was exhibited in Women to Watch 2010, Body of Work: New Perspectives in Figure Painting at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Most recently she had a 2014 solo exhibition of new work at Plug Projects in Kansas City.
