Embodied Art – 11 – Rehab and New Homes

‘… the search for a home is one of the recurrent dream themes in the initial analytic work of modern women, daughters of the patriarchy’
— Silvia Brinton Perera¹Descent to the Goddess. A way of Initiation for Women, Inner City Books, 1981 – p. 19

In January 1933, an exhibition of ‘New & Some Old’ paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe’s was hung at Stieglitz’ last gallery, An American Place.

Alfred was permitted to visit Georgia only 10 minutes per week, while she was hospitalised in February and March, because his presence would evoke fear in her. He brought her photos from the exhibition showing lots of visitors. However, no paintings were sold from the show due to the general economic setback.

When she was well enough to leave the hospital, Georgia went on a recreational trip to Bermuda for two months with an old friend, and her daughter. Back in the US, Georgia stayed for almost the rest of the year at Lake George. She was unable to paint, and her reunion with Alfred was complicated.

She had adopted a stray cat, for example, whose company did her much good. When Stieglitz arrived at Lake George and intended to dismiss the cat, Georgia had an intense and tearful reaction which made him change his mind.

Georgia’s illness had shaken her husband emotionally, to such a degree that his infatuation with Dorothy Norman was fading. Norman would stay as an assistant to Alfred and a fundraiser for his gallery for the rest of his life, but she was no longer a threat to Georgia.

By the end of the year a mutual friend, the writer Jean Toomer, came to Lake George. Alfred was back in New York, and Toomer and Georgia were alone in the house. In the beginning they spoke only very briefly at the end of each day. Toomer was writing on a book, and his mere presence seemed to have a healing influence on Georgia. She became more relaxed and wanting to open up and share her inner world. Toomer wrote enthusiastically to Stieglitz about her progress.

Jean Toomer was born with the Neptune-Pluto conjunction, like Georgia, and his birth chart also contained a stellium — consisting of four planets, three in Capricorn and one in late Sagittarius. This alone might suffice to create a resonance — although their charts were very different.

Uranus in Toomer’s chart was moreover conjunct Jupiter in O’Keeffe’s chart — a cross aspect that can create expanded awareness, great joy, and liberation for both parties. When he visited Georgia in December 1933, transit Jupiter was furthermore conjunct Uranus in Georgia’s chart.

These were very strong archetypal energies providing a double effect of the Uranus-Jupiter combination, and also involving Georgia’s natal Venus. Similar vibrations had been evoked in her relationship with the political scientist, Arthur McMahon.

And besides this, transit Saturn, as mentioned earlier, was exact on Georgia’s South Node indicating a past life theme. It seemed to be no accident, that they were to be together at precisely this particular time — perhaps a pre-birth appointment made by souls.

‘One night he picked up a tray and began thumping out an Indian rhythm on the bottom of it. Georgia wrote Marjorie: “I got the shivers all over, through the roots of my hair.”‘ ²Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, by Roxana Robinson, 1999, Kindle edition p. 395, (Marjorie was the friend she went to Bermuda with).

A deep current was opened and circulating between Toomer and O’Keeffe during these days — and yet ‘she felt strongly that their separation was inevitable’.³Ibid. p. 397 Georgia later had a dream confirming this. They kept writing each other intimate letters for years thereafter.

‘Toomer’s calm and meditative gaze, his tenderness and warmth, had restored Georgia to a condition in which she again was aware of her own value, her own worth as a person. It was a great gift.’⁴Ibid. p. 396

Shortly after Toomer had left, she began to paint. The following spring she made another trip to Bermuda, and in June 1934 she went to New Mexico again.

She had realised, not for the first time in her life though, that she needed a ‘kind of aloneness’ — not because she wanted it — there just seemed to be ‘no other way.’⁵Ibid. p. 403She would channel her deep feelings for others into her artworks, and it also seemed easier for her to express her love through letters, when she was at a physical distance from her beloved.

And some feelings of hers could be expressed only with drawings, colours, brushes….

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As the years went by, Georgia O’Keeffe found two new homes in New Mexico. During one of her initial trips, she had been attracted to a particular mountain, the ‘Cerro Pedernal’⁶Spanish word for flint hill.

There was a view to this mountain from the windows of the first house she moved into at a dude ranch, called the Ghost Ranch, in 1936. From different angles she would paint the beautiful scenario with the mountain again and again.

God told me, if I painted it enough, I could have it
—Georgia O’Keeffe

Besides her conversations with God, her paintings reveal an additional channel to the divine, a wordless one, very alive, quiet, deep, organic, soft, and powerful. Painting seemed to be a spiritual practise for her, as we might formulate it today, and the following quote shows that she was more in alignment with the findings of Carl Jung and his reverence for the unconscious than with Freud’s ideas.

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”
—Georgia O’Keeffe

The Door

Her second house in New Mexico was chosen because of a door. A door in an adobe wall that she would also paint over and over again — ‘twenty-two times between 1946 and 1960’.⁷Instagram O’keeffe Museum

‘I’m always trying to paint that door — I never quite get it,’ O’Keeffe said. ‘It’s a curse — the way I feel I must continually go on with that door.’⁸From the website ‘My Georgia O’Keeffe’ by Ann Daly.

What did this door symbolise?

When she first saw the adobe house in the mid-1930s, it was an abandoned ruin. It took her ten years to persuade the Catholic Church that she should be the new owner – ‘quite an achievement ‘ as she would describe it many years later.

The house had a walled garden in which she could grow flowers and vegetables, and the property had water rights meaning that irrigation was collectively regulated due to scarcity of rain in the area. Her house was restored almost from the ground, and a comfortable home was created, much inspired by the local pueblo construction style and with another beautiful view of the New Mexican landscape.

From her new homes she would now feed the collective consciousness with images of skulls and bones beautifully composed on backgrounds of high skies and landscape scenarios. She went out on day-long trips in her car to find motifs to paint, and she would turn the front seat around and use the back of the car as her studio so that she would also be protected from the powerful sunlight.

Often her paintings would be finished at Lake George, or in New York, during the winter time when she was staying with her husband.

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To be continued….