Today's blog post is by Candace, one of our Central Library staff.

“I wish you could see what I see out the window—the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north—the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky...pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars—and a feeling of much space—It is a very beautiful world.” – from a 1942 letter to painter Arthur Dove

Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings are amoungst the most well loved paintings in North America.  They are pretty and simple and austere. One of our new books, Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, sheds light on the two homes in New Mexico where she created many of these paintings.  It is a book that walks into the personal spaces of a great artist.

Ghost Ranch frames many of her most memorable landscapes.  The flat topped mountain twelve miles distant dominates the landscape and provides a dramatic backdrop for “The Deer’s Skull with Pedernal”.

O’Keefe painted the rocks and bones that she picked up in her rambles through the desert and brought back to her studios and the Jimson weed that grew by her patio.

The Abiquiu house provides us with her more livable house: the one with the garden and the cloths line.  It is also where she painted her patio door series. These doors represent, to me, some of the mystery in life.  I look at them and contemplate both their simplicity and the mystery they evoke of the unknown. They are not typical for her because her paintings were not usually mysterious, they were hymns to what she found beautiful.

Check out our other books on this iconic artist, and the biopic produced in 2009.

–Candace