Georgia O’Keeffe: Canyon with Crows and Other Watercolours

“I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.“

(Georgia O’Keeffe)

Georgia O’Keeffe, Canyon with Crows, 1917, watercolour

A few posts ago I wrote about Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolour “Morning Sky With Houses” (1916) and now I found myself in love with many more of O’Keeffe’s watercolours and I really want to share them with you all. “Canyon with Crows” is my second favourite these days, right after the “Morning Sky With Houses” because I cannot resists purple and orange together. In Georgia O’Keeffe’s vision the canyon is a groovy spectacle, a technicolor dream. In the background the pinks and blues are melting into purple, while the rich river of ruby red is paving its way through the fields of greens. Fields and patches of different colours and a canyon is created. Another wonderful detail here are the crows flying through the sky in a slightly ominous way, as if they warning us of an impending danger.

Georgia O’Keeffe arrived to Canyon, Texas in September 1916 to work as the head of the art department at the West Texas State Normal College. The vastness of the blue sky, the wildness of nature, the red sunsets and red soil, the hot winds blowing across the Texas prairie. The town of Canyon was named after the Palo Duro Canyon which means “hard wood”, referring to the juniper and mesquite trees that grow in that area. The wild, untamed nature of Texas proved to be very inspiring to O’Keeffe. The vibrant contrast between green foliage and red sandstone is stunning. Always adventurous, free and wild at heart, Georgia would spent many Saturdays hiking the risky steep and narrow paths of the canyon. The little town of Canyon with its structured pattern of streets and repetitive rows of houses was not something that O’Keeffe found particularly inspiring. In fact, she not only found it dull but also confusing. On one occassion she went out to mail a letter and she had trouble finding her way home because the streets looked so similar. Her love of wilderness and open spaces will be even more prominent later in life, especially when contrasted with Alfred Stieglitz’s love for the safety and predictability of urban spaces.

The watercolour “Red Mesa” is perhaps the most similar in theme and style to the “Canyon with Crows” but all of O’Keeffe’s watercolours painted in the short time period from 1916 to 1917 have that playfulness and vibrancy which I adore so much. O’Keeffe was particularly fascinated with sunrises. She loved the way the first rays of the sun would come into her room and paint it in soft vanilla yellow shades. Her watercolour “Sunrise” bellow is spectacular, painted in bright red and magenta pink shades. The colours look like they are melting into one another. While this watercolour isn’t realistic, the depiction of the intensity of the sunrise is realistic. Sunrises and sunsets are very strong in colour. Also, today is Georgia O’Keeffe’s birthday so why not enjoy her watercolours!

Georgia O’Keeffe, Canyon with Crows, 1917, watercolour, details

Georgia O’Keeffe, Sunrise, 1916

Georgia O’Keeffe, Pink And Blue Mountain, 1916, watercolour

Georgia O’Keeffe, Sunrise and Little Clouds No. II, 1916, watercolor on paper

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Mesa, 1917, watercolour

Foujita: La Vie – Everything Passes

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

This is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”

(Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human)

Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita, La Vie, 1917

Japanese artist Leonard Tsuguharu Foujita fell in love with Western art at a very young age and in 1913, at the age of twenty-seven, he moved to Paris. The role of an exotic eccentric in Montparnasse surrounded by fellow artists, foreigners and eccentrics fit Foujita like a glove. A person as vibrant and theatrical as he was belonged there. Some of the artists from his artistic gang were Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Juan Gris, Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Foujita’s painting “La Vie” is an example of his early work in France and the style of the painting reminds me so much of Modigliani. The painting shows a woman dressed in blue, set against the background of a solitary sandy beach with a single little boat, stranded and confined in sand instead of floating freely and being carried by the waves. The woman’s oval and slightly elongated face and the shape of her eyes remind me of Modigliani’s melancholy and mysterious mask-like female faces and also of the silent marble Brancusi’s Muse. Simplified and geomentric looking, her head and also the strange position of her hands seem as though they were borrowed from some archaic scuplture, or seen in a dream. The cheeks are bright pink and the fingers slender and long. Her head leans on her right in a very exaggerated way, as if this mysterious woman is bowing her head down, not from shame, but as a gesture of both a realisation of the defeat and calm acceptance. The waves in the water behind her are breaking and hitting the sandy shore then retreating in a rhythm of nature which neither of us can stop or influence. The mood that I feel in Foujita’s painting “La Vie” resonates with me strongly and serves almost as a sacred message to a feeling that is always inside me, sometimes more hushed and sometimes awaken like a volcano, like a wound that never heals, it brings anguish wrapped up in nostalgic rosy cover of sweetness. This feeling is the painful awareness of transience of everything, the powerlesness against the fast and unpredictable currents of life, the best way I can describe the feeling that the painting awakes inside me is by sharing a much loved quote from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”: “Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, […], and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” Everything passes, every spring and summer once gone are gone forever, a flower will bloom and wither and nothing can resurrect it, memories are pale and hushed shadows, tears cannot bring back a love once lost, and all change is inevitable, c’est la vie… So what else can we do but bow our heads down like Foujita’s silent and solemn muse and let the river of life flow, for our resistence would only bring anguish and ache.

Marie Laurencin: More Than Dead – Forgotten

Last week I wrote about the wonderful French painter Marie Laurencin and her paintings of wistful, dreamy girls in soft pastel colours. Today I thought I’d share a poem that Laurencin wrote in 1917 and it’s called “La Calmant”, translated in English as “The Sedative”. To go with the melancholy verses I chose Laurencin’s painting of a girl called Valentine. I love her face expression, the way she placed her head on her hand, and again, those gentle, pastel shades of pink, lavender and yellow typical for Laurencin’s artworks.

Marie Laurencin, Valentine, 1924

The Sedative (La Calmant):

More than annoyed
Sad.

More than sad
Unhappy.

More than unhappy
Suffering.

More than suffering
Abandoned.

More than abandoned
Alone in the world.

More than alone
Exiled.

More than exiled
Dead.

More than dead
Forgotten.

Federico García Lorca and Joan Miró – The olive trees are charged with cries

Today marks the 120th anniversary of birth of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936). Since I am enamoured by his poetry, and I’ve spent the last days of May sailing through the strange, beautiful and wild waters of his verses filled with lonely paths, gypsy wanderers, moon and olive trees, winds and oranges, I felt inspired to tackle some of Miró’s vibrant landscapes which encapsulate the spirit of Lorca’s poetry really well.

Joan Miró, The Village of Prades (Prades, el poble), 1917

I am regularly entranced by the simple and unassuming playfulness of Joan Miró’s paintings, but these two landscapes from the early days of his career, “The Village of Prades” and “Siurana, the Path” dazzle my imagination even more. Here the colour, rich, exuberant and warm, takes dominance over the drawing and the imagination wins the battle against logic and rationalism of the classic landscapes. This isn’t a landscape seen with mind, but felt with the heart.

It is little to call these paintings ‘landscapes’ when they are so much more; they are oceans of vibrant colours and psychedelic swirls and zig-zags, they are a resplendent butterfly perched on the delicate petals of a rare Mediterranean flower. Still, in formal classification, they are both landscapes and both were painted in the summer of 1917. Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893 so the period from 1907 to 1918 is usually considered as his early period. He saw himself a Fauvist at the time, something evident by the bright colours used without a trace of shyness. There is a hint of Cubism as well, in the sharp lines in the foreground of “The Village of Prades” and the way trees and bushes are broken down into cubical shapes, and there is also a spirit of Paul Cezanne’s paintings of Mount Victorie in the way distant yellowish mountains are carefully shaded in “Siurana, the path”. These were Miró’s formative years when he soaked the influences, took lessons from the art he saw in galleries, and tried to find his unique artistic language; a quest in which he succeeded.

These are the landscapes full of life and soul, landscapes which tremble and breathe, scream when the warm wind blows from the south, and laugh when the Moon brings the nocturnal caresses on solitary path and olive groves. It’s because of this heartful that my imagination connects them with the wonderful poetry of Federico García Lorca and here is his poem called “Landscape”:

The field
of olive trees
opens and closes
like a fan.
Above the olive grove
there is a sunken sky
and a dark shower
of cold stars.
Bulrush and twilight tremble
at the edge of the river.
The grey air ripples.
The olive trees
are charged
with cries.
A flock
of captive birds,
shaking their very long
tail feathers in the gloom.

Joan Miró, Siurana, el camí (Siurana, the Path), 1917

Precosia throws the tambourine
and runs away in terror.
But the virile wind pursues her
with his breathing  and burning sword.

The sea darkens and roars,
while the olive trees turn pale.
The flutes of darkness sound,
and a muted gong of the snow.

Are these swirls of yellow, these brooks of green and trembling shadows of lilac; is this a field the gypsy girl is running away from the satyr wind who yearns touch “the blue rose” of her womb in Lorca poem “The Gypsy and the Wind”? I adore these kind of landscapes which look as if the painter smoked some weed and then took his colours and started painting, and I think they fit perfectly with the mood of Lorca’s poetry because Lorca felt things with his heart, not with logic, and possessed a gift of conveying an atmosphere in a few words or a few lines. He felt Spain, the people and the nature very deeply and appraised and idealised the life of the gypsies. I love Lorca’s passion for living which comes out in his verses, and that means accepting both the joys and the sadnesses that come on the way, that passionate yet tragic perception of life is really inspiring to me. When I gaze at Miró’s landscapes, I imagine Lorca’s imagination in colours, in swirls, an explosion of beauty.

Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Silent Films and Frilly Dresses

America’s sweetheart, The girl with the curls, Little Mary – these are some of the nicknames for Mary Pickford, a silent film actress who recently captivated me.

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Before I started writing this post, I gave myself a task of watching a documentary about her called Mary Pickford: The Muse of the Movies (2012), which is really interesting and you can watch it on YouTube. It’s a good quality documentary; amusing with plenty of information, and the narrator has a pleasant voice. I liked that the focus was not only on Mary Pickford’s personality and different stages of her career, but on the development of Hollywood as we know it today, film industry and ‘flickers’, as the early films were known back then.

I utterly recommend you to watch the documentary as it is a great introduction into the glamorous world of Hollywood – a topic which has, as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, captivated me recently. Like majority of people, I like watching films, but I’ve never been a massive ‘Old Hollywood’ fan like my mum, for example. Films of the 1930s and 1940s somehow never captured my attention, and I always wondered, with a slight dose of envy, what my mum saw in them. Then, a few weeks ago, out of nowhere, I’m ill with a disease called ‘Old Hollywood glamour’, and the only cure is to watch as many films as you can!

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As you might have guessed by the title, a Hollywood phase I became fixated on is the Silent era and its main star, actress Mary Pickford. Her eyes are her most charming feature; two bright stars surrounded by long eyelashes, with the ability to express every emotion; from sadness and resignation to gratitude and rapture. Then her gorgeous curls, her famous curls, which she cut off in 1928 much to the dismay of her fans. Bobbing her hair happened as a sort of ritual of transition: her mother had just died, and she found herself incapable of playing little girls now that she wasn’t anyone’s ‘little girl’. Her phase of playing child-parts was over.

That’s a personality trait I liked about Mary Pickford – she knew how to end things while they were still good. She was a woman who achieved everything she set her mind to. A remarkable person, not just a great actress. Her ‘rags to riches’ life story continues to captivate people’s imagination. ‘America’s Sweetheart’ was born as Gladys Smith in Canada, on 8th April 1892, in a poor family with an alcoholic father. Not the best starting point for someone who’d later be the first Hollywood actress to earn a million dollars.

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Mary Pickford in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917)

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‘When Mary smiled, you could hear the angels sing’, said Lillian Gish, a fellow silent film actress and Mary’s lifelong friend.

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Advertisement in ‘Moving Picture World’, September 1916

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Mary Pickford’s life story is interwoven with the life story of another silent film actress – Lillian Gish. In 1905, the Smith family shared quarters with the Gish family. Namely, Lillian Gish (14 Oct 1893-1993) had a younger sister Dorothy (11 March 1898-1968) who was also an actress. Similarly, Mary Pickford was the eldest sibling, her sister Charlotte ‘Lottie’ and brother Jack were actors as well, though both had succumbed to alcohol and died fairly young. Both families led bohemian lives which are as rich as they are hard to endure. Mary and Lillian became lifelong friends.

Starting in theatre, both girls quickly transferred to films or ‘flickers’. Early films were sensationalistic (does anyone sense a revival these days?), and often close to being pornographic. Targeted audience was the working class. After a long day’s work at the factory or a construction site, they could go and a watch a film, which was cheap as chips, travel in their imagination and escape the greyness of their lives.

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Mary Pickford being painted, c. early 1920s

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Even though both were great actresses, Mary Pickford’s name stayed synonymous with the era of silent films. Early cinematography produced a great deal of actresses and icons such as Louise Brooks, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Pola Negri – all of which played very seductive and flirtatious roles. Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford had a different quality about them – they played more virtuous, innocent and girlish characters. They looked like dolls with their large expressive eyes and lush curls.

Lillian said herself: “I played so many frail, downtrodden little virgins in the films of my youth that I sometimes think I invented that stereotype of a role.” (source)

Lillian Gish plays a ‘frail, downtrodden little virgin’ Lucy Burrows in the film ‘Broken Blossoms‘ (1919). Brilliantness of the film comes from the combination of Lillian’s poignant portrayal of a ‘fragile waif’, gloomy and decaying Limehouse district of London as the setting, and the opium-laced mood and Eastern flair brought by Cheng Huan – a Chinese lad who came to London with a dream ‘to spread the gentle message of Buddha to the Anglo-Saxon lands.’ Lillian’s performance was remarkable, and the ending truly brought tears to my eyes, and I’m not someone who cries easily at films. Somehow, when watching a silent film, you focus all your attention at the face expressions, gestures, eye movements; everything is intensified. Some quotes from the title cards, Cheng Huan’s thoughts about Lucy.

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”Blue and yellow silk caressing white skin – her beauty so long hidden shines out like a poem.” (at 50.50 min)

”Breathing in an amber flute to this alabaster cockney girl her love name – White Blossom.” (at 55.18)

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I reckon Lillian has a naturally melancholic face, perhaps it is because her eyes are large and her lips really small, I dunno, but most of the photos of her have a slightly morbid appeal, at least for me. She’s a true Ophelia.

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Mary Pickford played a variety of roles, and often performed the stunts herself as a matter of fact, but her most memorable films are those where she plays a role of a little girl, something she successfully did up until the age of thirty-something. Up to now, I’ve watched four of such films, in this order: Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) where she stars as Gwendolyn, Pollyanna (1920) as Pollyana Whittier, The Little Princess (1917) as Sara Crewe, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) as Rebecca Randall. There’s more films where she plays child roles, but the next thing I want to watch is ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ (1929) – it’s a ‘talkie’ she performed with her then-husband Douglas Fairbanks. That should be smashing!

There’s something so appealing about Mary Pickford’s roles in these particular films; a mixture of naivety and innocence, enhanced by her costumes and curls, and a courage and generosity. Goodness always wins in the end: in Poor Little Rich Girl she unites her previously money-and-success-distracted parents, in The Little Princess she finds a wealthy foster parent and brings her friend along, in Pollyanna she brings optimism to everyone she encounters. If audiences of the time saw a hope for the better world in those films, I fully understand them.

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Mary Pickford in The Taming of the Shrew (1929)

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Isn’t it strange, back then, a twenty-five year old actress could play a little girl, while today fourteen year old girls are encouraged by the media to look much older and ”attractive”.

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Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish’s expressive eyes reminded me a great deal of Anna Karina, just because I watched her films first. I noticed a certain ‘silent film’ quality about Anna Karina’s acting. Others did too: With her expressive, luminous eyes and radiant presence she had the looks of a silent movie star while simultaneously embodying the self-confident spirit of the 60s generation.” (source) This correlation is especially prominent in Godard’s film Vivre sa Vie (1963) where Anna Karina ironically plays – an aspiring actress. Really, even if you excluded the speaking parts, her eyes would reveal everything.

Another thing I wanted to discuss was the costumes. Mary Pickford has a marvellous wardrobe in her child-roles: straw hats or flowers in her lush curly hair, knee-long white dresses with lace and frills, worn with white tights, then her cute polka-dot dress with several petticoats and a parasol as an accessory in the role Rebecca, her cute one piece pyjama in ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’. Even in others pictures I’ve shown here, she looks elegant like a spring day – in frilly white dresses, wide hats, string of pearls, empire waist for a girlish appeal, lots of lace. Is it a charming 1910s revival of Rococo and Marie Antoinette countryside style, or a prelude to modern Japanese Lolita style?

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