Lovely, lovely. Don’t you think ?
So what ? You might ask. Ah well, here is my point. Being the country bumpkin that I am, I have not been exposed to a lot of great art.
There are not many art museums in towns with a populations of 850 people. This is where I grew up. So what I get exposed to is what is available at the poster store, the home decorating place or the craft store. And these places have one or two or three works from great artists and you see the same ones over and over.
For years, I did not think too much of the Van Gogh paintings that I had seen. There were the self portraits and the sunflowers and maybe Starry Night. Then one day, I went to a web site about his life and there they had virtually ALL his work. I looked at dozens of paintings. I was transformed.
I began to understand a little of his uniqueness. Then I went back and looked at Starry Night like I was seeing it for the first time !
The same thing happened yesterday with Georgia O’Keefe. I think I had seen maybe 3 of her paintings, all of them of the flowers, which of course are wonderful. But when I saw most of her work, I was again astounded by it’s beauty. I guess what kind of bugs me, is somebody somewhere decides, “These are the 4 works that will sell the best and don’t bother with the rest” and folks like myself never see that artist’s other great work. Some of MY favorite Van Goghs are NOT of sunflowers :-) And now I know that my favorite Georgia O’Keefe is NOT a flower either !
Now I want to see more art, and when I see something interesting by an artist, I will try and find a place to see a big chunk of their work. Because then you begin to see what they were seeing, it’s a wonderful thing.
If you have a few minutes check out the rest of Georgia’s work on the web link. I hope you will be as pleasantly surprised as I was.
I guess ultimately we are all responsible for our own education. So I will be out there doing just that. And I will start by finding an affordable copy of ‘White Birch’ by Georgia O’Keefe to hang in my house.