O is for Georgia O’Keeffe, Artist, #AtoZ Challenge 2017

Liz Brownlee ♦ April 18, 2017 ♦ 7 Comments

Today there is another blog from guest blogger,  Jan Dean!

Blue and Green Music by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1921

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Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887  and died in 1986.

Georgia O’Keeffe was an important and influential American painter.  Although most of her work portrays landscape, bones, shells and stones, she is best known for her flower paintings.  She was the first person to paint flowers much larger than life; she wanted people to be stopped in their tracks by the beauty that she saw in the flowers and painting them big was the way she chose to do it.  Hers was a very original vision.

She spent most of her life in the deserts of New Mexico, immersing herself in the natural world which she wanted to paint. When she grew old she lost her sight and instead of painting she made sculpture.  She once said:

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

she paints the many-petalled poppy

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lush lava red and layered

it’s black heart soft            enveloping as soot

I stand outside the frame

and know that I could fall

into its flame

though petals seem like orange silk

they burn              it is a furnace of a flower

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this is how she sees the poppy

fierce and beautiful

and so she paints the blaze of it

not as a red dot in a safe green space

but an inferno roaring wild across the canvas

huge

a forest fire which cannot be put out

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stop

the poppies scream

see

this is who we are

we are unlocked now

and never going back

into the place where you ignored us

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© Jan Dean

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If you’d like to read about more extraordinary women, why not buy the book Reaching the Stars, Poems about Extraordinary Women and Girls, by me, Jan Dean and Michaela Morgan – link below, press on book!

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