Special Drawing Number 8
Georgia O’Keefe
GEORGIA O’KEEFE, 1916. CHARCOAL ON PAPER.
While cubism swept America and predominantly male artists found sacred abstraction in harsh, geometric forms, Georgia O’Keefe was looking elsewhere. A pioneer of the abstract American painting, she was not interested in the rigorous, almost mathematical deconstruction of the European schools that found its abstraction through an imposed distance from the natural seen world. Instead, she looked directly to nature, finding beauty and inspiration in the organic forms that surrounded her and the rhythms of the living world. She began a series of charcoal drawings that tried to place the images she found in her subconscious, forms that for her were perhaps a part of the universal psyche but difficult to access. They are grasps towards the unknown, ways to capture a feeling of existence by isolating the movement of nature, and she returned, over the course of her career to the spiral. Seen here in fleshy monotone, it speaks at once to life and death, a dark void that moves downwards until it finds the centre and here, experiences rebirth.