Georgia O'Keeffe "Calla Lily Turned Away"

Hello, my lovely ladies!

 

How does Florida find you today?  It’s raining here in New Jersey, and kind of cold.  I don’t think it should be cold in May.  I think it should be sunny and warm and lovely.  I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the May flowers – which is how I selected the amazing artist I’m going to tell you about today, too!

 

The picture on the back is “Calla lily turned away”, painted in 1923 by Georgia O’Keeffe.  Georgia was a very famous artist, and most of the paintings that people know best are of her close ups of the inside of flowers – she would paint them so that you would see just the inside bits of the flower in the painting, and not the outside edges of the petals.  I’ll find one of her really famous ones that I like a lot to include,too – sometimes she used the most amazing colors! But I like the Calla Lily  one, because it’s very simple, like her more famous pieces, but you can also see the whole flower.  I like that she put just one flower in the picture, instead of filling up the page with lots of them – it seems very elegant, and very peaceful.

 

For a while, Georgia lived in New Mexico and she did a lot of paintings of the land out there, with bright blue skies and the orange/red colored earth that happens out in the west, and those are probably my favourite paintings of hers – I love those colors together! - but most of them also have animal skulls or bones in them (when bones lie in the sun for  a long time they can become very white, and they can be beautiful – but I was afraid they might creep you out, so I didn’t pick one of those to send. 

 

One of the things that I think is really cool about Georgia O’Keeffe was that she didn’t give up when things got hard.  When she was a bit older, she started to lose her vision.  When she couldn’t see to paint any more, she learned to make pottery instead so that she could continue to make art.  I think that’s pretty amazing. 

 

Georgia also is supposed to have said one of my favourite quotes - “I wish people were all trees.  I think I could enjoy them then.”  I think that is brilliant and funny, and as someone who occasionally has trouble talking to people, there are days when I wish people were trees, too.  Or dogs.  I am often much better at talking to dogs than I am at talking to people.

 

Oh, I don’t have a picture, but I used panda bears for my Andy Warhol project – I took a picture of one and copied it over and over and colored each one differently.  It was kind of cool!

 

Know that I love you both very much and think that you are awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula