When a Flower is Not Just a Flower
Everyone’s flower gardens are off-the-charts horny these days. Thick, luscious roses drape themselves over porch railings like women in a nineteenth-century saloon of il repute. Voluptuous daisies wink from atop their sinewy necks. Husky stalks of lavender sway to the seductive rhythm of a rocking pollinator. Day lilies flash their peach and pink and randy red petals, splayed open in a way that would make Annie Sprinkle blush. Right next to the sidewalk, too! Children play there for goodness sake! Hussies.
It’s as if each and every bloom is auditioning to be a Georgia O’Keeffe model. Not a bad thing to want to be.
You might be an O’Keeffe fan and appreciator from way back. You might squint at the name vaguely recalling a poster of an enormous black iris hanging over your roommate’s bed in college. And then you might also remember how much it freaked you out when your parents came to visit and your stepdad couldn’t stop staring at it. O’Keeffe knew she was going to be an artist by age ten. When I was ten I knew I wanted to have a kitchen like Barbie’s that was vanilla-scented and came with cute, pink pots and pans. Maybe it’s true that genius is born not made. In 1905, O’Keeffe turned 18 and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute in Chicago where she ranked at the top of her class and essentially kicked creative ass all over the damn place.
It would take her another decade or so before a series of creative breakthroughs lead her to discover an entirely new way of painting. This involved borrowing from elements of design and composition and combining them with an abstract approach to painting. The result was the creation of an innovative style and distinct look that became synonymous with O’Keeffe. It also happened to revolutionize art, to the extent that O’Keeffe became known as the mother of the American modernism movement. What? Like it’s hard?
Influenced by places like New York City and the American Southwest, O’Keeffe painted many different types of things from sweeping vistas of undulating mountains sweeping vistas to the blanched skulls of horses, but it’s those damn, gigantic flowers that everyone wants to talk about. Rightly so! Those salacious, curving petals coming together in a lascivious pout, iterative of the glorious locus of female beauty and empowerment. Mercy, Georgia! Buy me dinner first, okay?
But here’s the thing: As Snooty McSnooterson art critics began “hmmm-ing” and “ummm-ing” over these paintings of what they decided were 100% vaginas realized in floral form, O’Keeffe was all, “Hey, I’m just over here painting flowers. Maybe you just need a good therapist to work out a few things.” In writing published for an exhibition catalogue of her work, O’Keeffe attempts to set the record straight:
A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it… Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.
So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
“Seeing takes time” should be added to the seal of the Republic. But more importantly, O’Keeffe makes the point that it’s worth taking time to see; to stop and look and notice; to lose yourself in close observation; to use precious minutes caught up in wonder, astonishment, fascination. I think this is some of the most important work we can do—if not for anything else, but for our self-preservation and necessity to be as fully human as possible.
O’Keeffe’s genius was not just her painting. Her canvases are awesome in the true definition of that word. Her gift was also in teaching us the art of paying attention and helping us reap its rewards, using her flowers to lure us to this divine practice like bees.
