Leibovitz, Georgia O'Keeffe's Handmade Pastels, 2010
I was being given an award at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, and they kindly offered to take me to Ghost Ranch and
to her house in Abiquiú, up on a hill overlooking the valley. So I went, and as
I walked into her studio I started to cry. Something just hit me about the way
she lived. Her frugality – all of her linens were frayed – is a reminder that
we don’t need much. She had a simple life: she worked every day, grew a
vegetable garden and ate well, walking on this land that she was so drawn to.
She was the real thing.
I was lucky. The museum’s curator, Barbara Buhler Lynes,
showed me around. She had written a book about where O’Keeffe painted. There’s
a red hill in some of the paintings that looks like a mountain; in reality, it
is only about 12ft high, almost an anthill. What’s remarkable about the house
is that it’s pretty much been left the way she had it when she was alive. The
pastels that O’Keeffe made herself are in the museum. Seeing them, you really
have the sense that she held and used them. They are the colours of New Mexico:
the reds are the sand in the hill, the blues are the sky.
- Annie Leibovitz
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