Head in the Troposphere

Skyscapes provided many pondertunities on this trip.

While on the road I saw more weather changes in 5 days then I have in 5 years in LA. The lightening storms and coalescence of clouds amazed. The lightening's staccato, the thunder's echo; clouds like dessert - whipped, layered, spun, sugared, clouds like dreams - infinite and lovely. I now better understand the french expression coupe de foudre - love at first sight/lightening strike. This region is hotter than love and full of electricity.

A highlight of Santa Fe was, of course, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. However on view was the abstraction show that I saw in January at the Whitney. I was happy to see some of those pieces again - especially the watercolors - but it would have been nice to see some iconic works from the collection while in the land that so enchanted her.

I unabashedly love GOK, so it was astonishing that I discovered something about her work that was below the surface and it took going to NM to figure out. I was thinking about, for maybe the first time, her absolute necessity to abstract - selection, elimination, emphasis - to get to the real meaning of a thing. Especially in a landscape whose beauty (color, texture, minimal, barren, essential) in unexplainable, abstraction becomes the most definite form for the intangible thing. Looking at her work I know how she felt about what she was looking at - the actual feeling that it gave her (as opposed to a recreation or interpretation).

And her framing - all that tension at the edges - she is framing a place at the edge, precipice, horizon line, the last moment before something breaks or changes. I understand that she saw this all around her in NM and that with these feelings it gave her, she had to find a way to give back to the world-- so as she says she couldn't sing so she had to paint.

Which is making me think about american transcendental aesthetics in nature (seriously). Nature does inspire and on this trip I had very powerful firsthand experience of the aesthetic value of the wild. It was a relief to escape the city of SantaFe, whose simulations of Native American culture felt exploitive, not attempting to preserving the heritage, but regionalizing the culture to kitch, tourism/marketing. The objects in windows provided commodity and entertainment for tourists, they are completely disconnected from their original meaning and/or purposes. These objects have lost all signification, simulacra, creating an illusion making it more desirable for people to buy into the message that our government (or whoever) wants to send Native American people. It was depressing, so every opportunity to have experiences in nature that transcended real life was treasured. Escape...