Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico

NEW MEXICO: AN ARTISTIC PILGRIMAGE
Georgia O'Keeffe's high-desert love affair

DEANNA MACDONALD
Special to The Globe and Mail, June 30, 2007
Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070629.okeefe30/BNStory/specialTravel/


TAOS, N.M. -- From her first visit to New Mexico in 1917, Georgia O'Keeffe was hooked. "I loved it immediately," she recalled. "From then on, I was always on my way back."

And from my own first visit, I knew exactly what she meant. Maybe it's the altitude (Santa Fe is at 2,133 metres), maybe it's the stunning desert light, but in New Mexico you feel more awake, like your vision is clearer, the sky closer, the colours more intense. It's the kind of place that can leave you spellbound by dusk light on an adobe wall or the shape of a red-rock hill. It is, O'Keeffe said, a "perfectly mad-looking country; hills and cliffs and washes too crazy to imagine, all thrown up into the air by God and let tumble where they would."

It is this "mad" landscape around Santa Fe, Taos and Abiquiu that inspired O'Keeffe's art. With her unique blend of abstraction and crisp realism, she captured more than just this unique topography. Her canvases feel like New Mexico in all its harsh beauty and deep cultural layers. Those desert landscapes have been home to the Ancestral Puebloans since the 1100s, to Spanish settlers since the 17th century, and has been a part of the U.S. since 1848. And though New Mexico has changed since O'Keeffe created her last image - she died in Santa Fe in 1986, at the age of 98, but had stopped painting in 1971 because of failing eyesight - the places and qualities that inspired her are still there.

I spent a few days visiting these places and I was not the only person following in her brushstrokes. Today, Wisconsin-born O'Keeffe is almost like a goddess in New Mexico - she is spoken about in reverential tones; her desert homes are meccas for her fans; and the areas she painted are referred to as "O'Keeffe Country." This year has even been declared "the Year of Georgia O'Keeffe" in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. The museum is the first in the U.S. dedicated to a single female artist and houses the largest collection of her works in the world. I could have seen reproductions in almost any shop in town, but there is nothing quite like the texture and brushstrokes of the originals. I spent a morning in the O'Keeffe Museum looking at the sensual flowers and New York cityscapes that first brought O'Keeffe fame in 1920s New York (where she lived with her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz) and the images she began to paint in 1929 during the first of what would become her annual summer visits to New Mexico.

At first, she stayed in Taos, about an hour northeast of Santa Fe, where I headed next. On Route 68, about five kilometres south of Taos, I spotted my first O'Keeffe subject in the soft, curved adobe walls of the 18th-century church of Ranchos de Taos. O'Keeffe called it "one of the most beautiful buildings in the United States by the Spaniards" and painted it several times. I expected it to be some sort of museum, but it remains a functioning church, with visitors frequently pulling into its dusty parking lot to snap a shot of O'Keeffe's iconic apse against a clear sky.

When she first came to Taos - at the invitation of heiress and art patron Mable Dodge Luhan - the small town was a mix of old Mexico, frontier outpost and developing artist colony. It was set next to the famous Taos Pueblo, a collection of multi-storey adobe dwellings dating from the 1450s, which O'Keeffe would also paint.

Today, Taos's Wild West, artistic attractions have been dampened by its popularity with tourists. Its streets are now filled withboutiques and trendy Southwestern restaurants. Rising real-estate prices often soar above the means of locals and the artists the area attracts. Despite this, it retains its bohemian cachet, particularly at the rambling Mabel Dodge Luhan House, which is now an inn and artist centre. Found at the end of a dirt road at the edge of the Taos Pueblo Indian Reservation, it has pinon wood in its fireplaces and Native American rugs on its wood floors. And the surroundings - a high-desert plateau dotted with cottonwood trees below and 3,742-metre-high Taos Mountain in the distance - remain much as when O'Keeffe stayed there.

But after a few summers amid the social scene of Taos, O'Keeffe, who enjoyed her solitude, searched for a quieter place to paint. In 1934, she fell in love with the area around Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch about an hour west of town, overlooking the Chama River Valley. For many years, she would rent a simple, secluded house on the ranch, from which she roamed the area on foot or in her black Ford, painting pictures of red cliffs, broad skies and the animal bones she found in the desert.
With its array of colours, the desert landscape offered all she needed to paint: "All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens." She became fascinated by the hills and mesas that in the dazzling desert light never seemed to get any closer however far one walked toward them. "I had looked out on the hills for weeks and painted them again and again - had climbed and ridden them - so beautifully soft, so difficult ..."

The colourful hills and endless skies are still there, as is Ghost Ranch, now a Presbyterian-run retreat. I drove onto the property with a wary eye open for evangelical types, but no one even seemed to notice I was there. The ranch has embraced its O'Keeffe history (the painter was aghast when the church took over in 1955, though she later had a cordial relationship with the new proprietors). Visitors are permitted to freely visit the landscapes she painted, but not the house she lived in, which is now privately owned.

From near the visitor parking, I walked about 2.5 kilometres through the red-rock landscape to Chimney Rock. The fantastic formation offers a spectacular view across the valley, including distinctive, flat-topped Pedernal Mountain, one of O'Keeffe's favourite subjects. "It's my private mountain," she once joked. "God told me if I painted it often enough, I could have it." And in a way the promise was kept: Her ashes were scattered around Pedernal.

My last stop was the nearby village of Abiquiu, which is not much more than a small cluster of adobe houses and a mission church arrayed around a dusty dirt plaza on Route 285. But here, on a bluff overlooking the Chama River Valley, is the 200-year-old adobe house that O'Keeffe purchased in 1945 and where she moved full-time after Stieglitz's death in 1946. Today, it remains as she left it in 1984 and can be visited if you book well in advance. Unfortunately, I did not and had to be satisfied with peering over the fence and seeing from a distance the view she never grew tired of. "When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country any more... unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I am gone," she said near the end of her life.

Pack your bags

GETTING THERE
Air Canada (http://www.aircanada.com) flies daily to Albuquerque, about an hour south of Santa Fe, via Denver from Toronto and Montreal. From there, a rental car is the best way to tour O'Keeffe Country.

WHERE TO STAY
La Fonda Hotel 100 San Francisco St., Santa Fe; 505-982-5511; http://www.lafondasantafe.com. Rooms for $169 to $565.

Mable Dodge Luhan House Inn and Workshop 240 Morada Lane, Taos; 505-751-9686 ; http://www.mabeldodgeluhan.com. Rooms for $101 to $245.

The Abiquiu Inn 21120 Highway 84, Abiquiu; 505-685-4378; http://www.abiquiuinn.com. Rooms for $85 to $213.
Visiting O'Keeffe Country

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, events include museum exhibits, lectures, a gala and special performances by the Santa Fe Opera. Next Saturday is "An O'K Day," a celebration of the artist in Santa Fe. For information, visit http://www.okeeffemuseum.org.

The Georgia O'Keeffe House in Abiquiu is open for tours on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from spring through late autumn. Book well in advance. Call 505-685-4539.