“It is a beautiful, untouched, lonely feeling place…the faraway. It is a place I have painted before…It is something in the air—it is sky—it is the desert—it is the feeling of something far off.”[1]

Something strange and wonderful was happening. I could see!

Two months ago, I completed cataract surgery on both eyes. I visited the historic painting gallery at the Huntington Library in San Marino, a few miles south of our family home in Pasadena, California. I gazed at a familiar painting of twelve-year-old Sarah Moulton: Pinkie, by Thomas Lawrence (1794). Far across the room on the opposite wall hung Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough (c. 1770). These were familiar images that also hung on the hallway wall outside my childhood bedroom.

In past visits, this famous painting appeared flat and uninteresting. After a few minutes, I moved on to other exhibits.
This time my new eyes revealed vivid colors and tiny details. Pinkie had not been painted with flat colors, as the layers of paint that Lawrence built up became clearer to me. The figure of the young woman was not only in a pink dress. Colors had become vibrant and moving, as the sash around her waist was a warm rose that made the fabric look like silk fluttering in the breeze. Ribbons in her bonnet were painted light pink, with slow, delicate strokes. The face and hands of the girl had a youthful peach-pink glaze.

A familiar masterpiece imprinted from my childhood had, in a wondrous way, become vibrantly alive.

What was God doing with me in this gift of renewed sight? An answer came weeks later when my friend, Professor Ron Dart, University of Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada, suggested that I explore the experience of artist Georgia O’Keeffe in the New Mexican desert.

What could this mean? Art and artists were a blind spot for me. In the grand hall of the Huntington Library, surrounded by famous paintings worth millions of dollars, I was restless and unfocused, eyes heavy with fatigue. I had to get outside for some fresh air.

In the desert, I have had timeless meditations before a cottonwood tree, after which I felt renewed and energized.

Could Georgia O’Keeffe unlock the mysterious connection between art and the desert?

Searching for background information about the artist, I found help in John Poling’s memoir about the two years he spent living with and assisting O’Keeffe at her home in Abiquiu.

The desert first captured Georgia O’Keeffe’s artistic vision when she visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1929 with her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan. The colors, forms, and wide-open spaces inspired her imagination. In the 1930s she spent her summers at nearby Ghost Ranch, finding the landscape, bleached bones and desert shapes complimented her abstract artistic expression. Eventually, she lived full-time in the village of Abiquiu in an old adobe house. She relished the isolation and solitude of this desert land.
I know the feelings that captured her. They have enchanted me in my desert wanderings. There is a wondrous clarity in the dry air and bright sunlight that reveals everything in its essence. O’Keeffe’s sense of wonder and connectedness to all things, animate and inanimate, grew increasingly intense.

This was her spirituality. She did wander a few times over to the Christ in the Desert Benedictine Monastery, twelve miles to the west. The Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton had a memorable visit with O’Keeffe. However, she was spiritual, not religious. Her holy longing was for communion with this land, and the combusting energy from those encounters exploded in paint on canvas.
This is an earth-based mysticism based on reverence for the land, desert light, and solitude. For myself, the Real Presence is the bread and wine of the Eucharist. For O’Keeffe, Real Presence was the earth, and all created things. The desert strips away noise and distractions and leaves what really matters: the sacred emptiness.

Spiritual practices for O’Keeffe included acts of attention, really seeing. As her paintings enlarged bleached bones and vibrant flowers, she believed this revealed essence. Her ascetic life of solitude included long walks alone and silence. Once we strip the land down to the essentials, truth and reality are revealed.
O’Keeffe expressed her passionate earth spirituality on canvas, creating several paintings of the skull of a desert ram, suspended between earth and sky as a desert relic. Bones are pure form.
“Form” and “essence” sparked my memories of forty-five years teaching philosophy at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, California. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a focus of our studies.

Did O’Keeffe take a college philosophy class? Her desert perception of form and matter echoes the insights of Aristotle. I can see a clear connection between Aristotle and O’Keefee’s ram’s head painting.
What could Aristotle’s views on painting say to us? When the temporary qualities of a thing (accidental) are stripped away, the identity of a thing is more visible. When the hair, hide, blood vessels, and eyes are absent, its identity is more visible. So, when a ram is alive, it is living matter in the form of ram-ness. In death, that matter changes; flesh and organs dissolve into dust. The form of the ram is in the bones. The skull still reveals the ram’s identity.
I believe O’Keeffe knew this mystically and intuitively as she painted the skull as a pure form of the ram. O’Keeffe removed the “accidents” surrounding the ram: desert sand, the ram’s carcass, with no hints of death or decay.
For Aristotle and O’Keeffe, the skull of the ram is “substance.” It continues to exist, although changed. We have its identity as ram even after it died. O’Keeffe emphasized the skull by making it huge, attracting the viewer’s full attention.
O’Keeffe uses the sky in the painting as a pure, uncluttered background that makes the form of the skull stand out. She expresses in her painting what Aristotle teaches in his philosophy. She isolates the form of the skull so that we can see its essential nature.

O’Keeffe said, “The bones do not symbolize death to me. They are shapes that I enjoy. It never occurs to me that they have anything to do with death. They are very lively. They please me.”[2]

The ram’s head paintings of O’Keeffe are a visual expression of what Aristotle communicates in his Metaphysics.

You and I participate in metaphysics as we contemplate her work, her communion with the desert, and her revelation of the essence and form within all things.

How can the way O’Keeffe saw form and matter help you and me in our contemplations of the desert? Remember that she lived for years in an old adobe home in the New Mexican backwater village of Abiquiu.  She treasured silence and solitude. Long desert walks prepared her for her mystical encounters. She looked for shapes, observing without analysis. Her solitary life prepared her to see things as they are.

I am walking through an ancient volcanic field off Highway 395, near Big Pine, California, in the Eastern Sierra. I hike along a sandy cattle path through creosote and salt grass, encountering a huge lava boulder as tall as a human. Sitting on the fallen trunk of an old cottonwood tree, I study the shape of the fire-born rock. A feeling of serenity settles over me.

There are red and black fissures. Powder blue sky background highlights sharp edges. I narrow my focus on a gaping hole through the center of the formation.  An armored horned toad sticks its head out of this space, green, shiny green skin reflecting in the sunlight. Lizards are the only sign of life in this barren desert. The emptiness magnifies the presence of the rock and the lizard. Silence and the expansive flow of the landscape sharpen my focus on the rock.
Walking closer toward this space at the center of the rock, I can see an ocean of sagebrush flowing west toward the Sierra Nevada.
The fire-forged lava formation that I gaze at would not be an object to O’Keeffe. She would see it as a being, a solid presence in the desert. I notice how the edges of the rock meet the sky and the way the massive stone sits solidly upon the loose desert sand. Yes, its surface is rough to the touch and could cut my hand. There are smooth surfaces too. It is a complex composition, vomited out of a volcano a thousand years ago and must have landed with an earth-shaking thud right here, immediately beginning to cool and solidify, frozen in time, still emitting energy from its violent birth.

The rock is a being, says O’Keeffe. When I read this, I hear “animism”: where all creation, animate and inanimate, has a spirit presence. This is the spirituality of the local Paiute people who still live here.

O’Keeffe and the Paiute reject the way that Western rationalism could analyze and objectify this massive rock. Both would approach the formation with respect.
While the Paiute would feel a kinship toward the rock and include it within their living world, O’Keeffe looked at it from an aesthetic perspective. Her way of perceiving objects involved long, intensive, contemplative focusing in which the object enchanted her with a voice and feeling of companionship.

The sun sets behind the Sierra Nevada mountains as the formations in the volcanic field become shrouded in shadows, looking like black silhouettes. The lava rock I had been contemplating takes on the form of a human figure praying. I imagine Saint Antony the Great, meditating at sunset in the Egyptian desert. Like the presence of the large rock, the weight of his body sinks firmly into the sand. He is watchful and alert, ready to pray through the night that is unfolding.  As I walk back to the car, I have a new resolve to be like that rock presence and Saint Antony, rooted in the earth as I kneel to pray, vigilant for a visitation from the Lord.

Resources

Cowart, Jack. Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1987.

Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

Lynes, Barbara. Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place. Princeton University Press, 2004.

Corn, Wanda. Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern. London: Prestel Press, 2017.

[1] Cowart, Jack. Georgia ’Keeffe: Art and Letters. 112

[2] O’Keeffe, Georgia. “Summer Day, 1936”, audio transcript, Whitney Museum of American Art.