‘Channeling my inner Georgia O’Keeffe’ by St. Louis Dispatche’s Laurie Skrivan

One can’t write about vaginas, vajayjas and vulvas, as I did yesterday, and not think of Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist devoted to escavating our sensual psyches. O’Keeffe begs us not to turn away from the unrivaled sensual beauty of orchids, mountains and sacred mounds, entrances to meaning in life’s inner sanctums.

O’Keeffe’s words, paintings and life philosophy belong very much at Anne of Carversville because this originally ‘fierce’, bold woman lived and painted through her senses.

The bold art of this revolutionary artist who dared to paint through her senses is on exhibition in Washington D.C.at The Phillips Collection until May 9, 2010.

The Phillips exhibition overview reminds us that Georgia O’Keeffe was a radical thinker, deciding that her art would record her feelings and visceral observations and not the appearance of things.

The sensuality of nature was her Hermes, orchids her divine source of inspiration.

O’Keeffe believed in rules, cutting away excess in pursuit of divine essence. Not meaning to affront moon goddesses, Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t one of them.

By magnifying and tightly cropping her images, a framing device used by photographers, she found the means to express simultaneously the vastness of nature, the immensity of her own response to it, and a powerful sense of being one with it.

O’Keeffe’s work was considered shocking; her closeups of flowers immoral and scandalous, in a Midwestern sort of way. It’s easy for us to laugh and point a wagging figure at O’Keeffe’s world, but Americans haven’t evolved much since her lucid portrayal of vulva-like imagery in flowers made proper women squeam in discomfort — only to discover an erotic sensation on their pure bottoms.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, WashingtonExploring this question reminds me of the day in 2007 that I looked up the definition of ‘sensuality’ in the dictionary and understood that I am damned for certain. Beauty is produced not by God, but by the Devil, according to the patriarchy in charge of dictionaries, encyclopedias and human language.

Let me remind you that beauty is feminine — extolled by poets and knights and damned by priests. Men today seek this connection with beauty, even moreso than women, who remain ambivalent about the morality of beauty, sensuality and nature.

Women want what men have, while smart ones search for its opposite.

Men as environmentalists protecting land, nature, dolphins and all life’s species is a way for men to honor the feminine around them and in themselves, too. How dare men actually become sacred creatures! Well done, gentlemen.

In a crazy way this Flickr photo Rachel & Georgia O’Keeffe speaks to me about the relevance of the artists for a new generation of young women.

Will Georgia O’Keeffe’s own words continue to inspire? Here are some of my favorite O’Keeffe quotes:

I know that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality. I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say … in paint.

Georgia O’Keeffe 1930 by husband Alfred Stieglitz

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me … shapes and ideas so near to me … so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

Waterfall by Georgia O’Keeffe

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Series I—No. I, 1918. Oil on composition board, 19 3/4 × 16 in. (50.2 × 40.6 cm). Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Purchase with assistance from the Anne Burnett Tandy Accessions Fund 1995.8. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

One day I found myself saying to myself … I can’t live where I want to … I can’t go where I want to … I can’t do what I want to. I can’t even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, and that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself.

This poem by Pat Mora calls out to Georgia O’Keeffe. I found it on a web site Reconciling Saints.

I want

to walk,

with you

on my Texas desert,

to stand near

you straight

as a Spanish Dagger,

to see your fingers

pick a bone bouquet

touching life

where I touch death

to hold a warm, white

pelvis up

to the glaring sun

and see

your red-blue words

to feel you touch

my eyes as you touch canvas

to unfold

giant blooms.