Flowers in Art - Georgia O'Keefe Inspirations and Jewelry
- rootsandsprouts
- Feb 24, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 6, 2023
blog from Rootsandsproutsdesigns.com handcrafted natural stone jewelry
collection of Georgia O'keefe works
I have loved flowers for as long as I can remember. We used to have a deep MN basement, the one with tiny windows, red brown carpet and ugly 70's decore, and a large white concrete wall with nothing on it. It bothered me for years, and one day in junior high, I asked to check out a projector from the local library and color some art on the wall. I made a jungle scene with some animals, trees and tons of grasses and some poorly freehand colored flowers. I can't believe my parents let me do it, but they were in the middle of a divorce, so maybe they hadn't hardly noticed at all. In high school, I continued my obsession and fell in love with Georgia O'Keefe's earlier works on painted flowers. For Christmas one of my final years at home, my dad got me a large purple Georgia O'Keefe print that I had hung on my wall and had for many years to come. I finally donated it to spruce up a tiny, undecorated room used by two lovely sewers, one from Mexico and one from Thailand, both who immigrated here and worked for a small start up company I worked at. I was upset by the drabness of their tiny corners and decided to hang the painting in there for them to have while they sewed.
I'm not sure what it was about Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, but something to do with the close-upness and the unusual angles in which she painted her flowers, seeing them in a new light. She chose different vantages and zoomed her lens up close, cropping the images so just a small zoomed part was painted. You could look deep into a flower with a view not often seen or appreciated. This reminded me of how I did photography, I loved up close shots, and was psyched at the opportunity to take an elective course in the dark room in high school developing black and white prints from cool shots around town. I loved to zoom in close, like her flowers, and eventually took close up photos of flowers like her paintings. Even as a kid, I remember a magazine we used to get at home that had a contest where you could submit a photo called the 'mystery photo'. A photographer took a photo of a familiar object but often so up close that you couldn't tell what it was, and someone else could write in and 'guess' what the photo was of. One of the photos was a stack of quarters, zoomed up close, that the tiny edges of the coin looked like a stack of large gears. I was fascinated by this image and how such a usual object I'd seen hundreds of times became unrecognizable up close. So Georgia O'keefe's paintings became a little obsession for a time. One of my DIY hacks, since I was a poor college student, was to buy an O'keefe calendar and some glass plates from Pier One and cut out the pictures with some of the white frame remaining and make hanging art of her work for my wall. Here's a quick snippet of her and her flowers, along with a great biography link about her life below.
Fast forward. Flowers are still a love of mine. If you look in my home I have flower pillows and flower art, and chose to name this company Roots&Sprouts Designs for the love of nature and how beauty is often grown for some time unseen, like a plant, before the fruit emerges. Just when you think the bulb you planted last fall was a dud, it emerges, just the tiniest peek-a-boo out of the ground. In life, like in friendships, we have to wait for the good stuff. I am known for having a ridiculous amount of spring bulbs come up in our small front yard, and it still befuddles me why others don't throw more bulbs in the ground. Spring rains are free, they gift infinite blooms year after year with almost no maintenance and give a beautiful color to an otherwise drab spring landscape. They are God's gift and I agree with Georgia that not everyone sees them. Seeing but without really seeing. I was like that growing up, the unseen child after a parent's divorce. Maybe I connected with her art by making the unseen, seen. How she "forced" them to see. She was an inspiration. In her words...
"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not."
~Georgia O'Keefe
"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 - maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking - or give it to someone to please them. 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. " - Georgia O'Keeffe, "About Myself," 1939 1)
So you will continue to see flowers on my work and incorporated into my jewelry and in time, some home goods projects in the works. Here's a couple links to my flower jewelry. Happy shopping and take time to see something again for the first time.
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