I'm just back from a brief visit to Ghost Ranch, Georgia O'Keefe's summer home for many years. Actually, I didn't visit the house which has to be arranged separately. But the area is stunning and more than made up for anything else. Shapes simply rising immediately out of the ground. And colors that look impossibly bright and impossibly geometric, laid out in broad bands and conic hills. It has elements of looking back in time as you look at those bands and realize they are millions of years old. Then there's the fact that New Mexico has it own dinosaur, a relatively small one that was found here some years ago and eventually became New Mexico's state fossil. I wonder if any other states have their own official fossil. I really wish they had named it the official dinosaur instead of the official fossil. Sort of like a little kid's dream of having a pet dinosaur. I guess I shouldn't expect too much from a state legislature.
Apart from the sheer drama of the landscape, it was enlightening to see a particular landscape and compare it to the painting or paintings that O'Keefe made of that place. How she made you look at particular aspects of the scene or see the colors as she saw them. Even more, to see how she saw it at different times or seasons. And "her mountain", which slips into so many paintings, sometimes a major component, sometimes so small that is almost unnoticed. I especially liked one of her last paintings, Stairway to the Moon, that I had not seen before. Especially after hearing how she often slept on the flat adobe roof of her house and saw the home made ladder sticking up and over the parapet of the roof.
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