Where O'Keeffe Bloomed
Art can die of overfamiliarity. Think of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, or Pachelbel's "Canon," works seen or heard so often that their vital strangeness and originality seem all but lost. Or more on native ground, think of Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers and cattle skulls, images that have been "posterized" to the point of near invisibility.
Among the rewards of traveling to one of the more austerely enchanting places in the United States--a stretch of land in northern New Mexico extending up the Chama River valley from the bluff-perched hamlet of Abiquiu to the nearby 21,000-acre Ghost Ranch--is to recover a sense of the flinty originality of an artist whose deepest creative instincts resonated with this high-desert landscape. That rediscovery can even provide a light thematic backdrop to the traveler's own quest for renewal and re-creation, opportunities for which abound in this valley whose wide basin the Spanish dubbed Piedra Lumbre, or Shining Stone.
Many years after her first visit to New Mexico in 1917, O'Keeffe wrote that she was "always on my way back." And recalling her maiden journey to the Abiquiu area in 1931, she talked about the shapes of the hills and said that she had "never had a better time painting." During the '30s and '40s, as O'Keeffe's marriage with photographer and New York art impresario Alfred Stieglitz teetered precariously, she began spending longer stretches in New Mexico, often using her car as her studio. Renting and then buying a house on the Ghost Ranch from publisher Arthur Pack, she went on to purchase and remodel a sprawling 18th-century adobe hacienda in Abiquiu. In 1949, three years after Stieglitz's death, the 62-year-old O'Keeffe moved permanently to her Chama valley homes, spending the warmer months on the ranch, the colder ones in the village.
Abstract tongue. Whether painting distant mountains (particularly her beloved Pedernal), red and yellow sandstone cliffs, dead juniper trees, or the patio door of her Abiquiu house, O'Keeffe reconnected with her earliest artistic inclinations. She moved slowly from realism toward what one of her finest critics, Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., describes as a reacquaintance "with the issues of abstraction--the language that had always appealed to her." Increasingly, says biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, O'Keeffe chose subjects for their "private symbolism and inherently reductive form--a door in a wall, a curved road against a white field . . . ."
A visitor entering O'Keeffe territory might well begin in the village of Abiquiu, a small cluster of adobe houses and a mission church arrayed around a dusty dirt plaza. Just off the square sits the artist's walled 4-acre estate. A guided tour of the property, offered from spring through late autumn, must be booked--and paid for one month in advance--through the O'Keeffe Foundation (505-685-4539), though travelers should note that the house and other assets of the foundation will be transferred to the O'Keeffe museum by 2006.
The tour is richly rewarding. Each meticulously planned detail of the sprawling 5,000-square-foot house and studio shows how seamless art and life were for O'Keeffe and how little a distinction she drew between fine art and the more practical arts of architecture, interior and furniture design, and even horticulture. Everything--from the delicate flour-paste-covered mud floors of the living room to the monastic simplicity of her bedroom perched almost on the edge of the bluff--is as carefully thought out as anything O'Keeffe ever put on canvas.
Bounty hunting. To engage more actively with O'Keeffe's beloved valley, the visitor should plan for a stay at the nearby Ghost Ranch, a retreat and conference center run by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which received the property as a gift from Pack in 1955. (Information on the ranch and its Santa Fe branch is available by calling 877-804-4678 or at ghostranch.org. ) Courses in everything from photography to paleontology to opera, as well as guided hikes, archaeological digs, and even a desert pilgrimage to many of the local sacred sites, enable one to explore the visible and hidden bounties of this place. An aspiring photographer might spend free hours hiking up to the mesa next to Chimney Rock to watch the late-evening shadows extend across the valley, the red rocks of what O'Keeffe called the "badlands" turning a deep purple as they do. You might explore the on-site paleontology museum housing the oldest remains of a North American dinosaur, a Coelophysis (unearthed on the property), or visit the nearby Monastery of Christ in the Desert or the breathtakingly serene white mosque of Dar al Islam. You can even sign up for a bus tour of O'Keeffe's favorite painting sites and subjects on the ranch.
Back in 1955, O'Keeffe had been a bit huffy when she learned that Pack had given the ranch to the Presbyterians. But she softened with time, perhaps realizing that the church was offering other seekers a glimpse of what had nourished her own soul for so long--and so well.
LOCAL FAVE
"The first thing to do in Santa Fe: Have a typical New Mexican breakfast [of eggs, tortilla, beans, rice, and chile] at Tia Sophia's or Pasqual's. The plaza is the heart of the town. It gives a sense of what the town looked like ages ago. There is music, and you can see the world go by."
MARSHA MASON, Oscar-nominated actress who now lives outside Santa Fe, N.M.
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NEW MEXICO
Santa Fe
Albuquerque
Abiquiu
Ghost Ranch
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This story appears in the July 4, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.