The Hammock Papers: Inspiration.

08 May 2012

Inspiration.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Part of the Cliff, 1986

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is opening a new exhibition entitled " “Georgia O’Keeffe and The Faraway: Nature and Image,” which opens on May 11, 2012 and runs through May 5, 2013. The exhibition focuses on " the beauty and elegance of O’Keeffe’s paintings were prompted by the intimacy of her ongoing experiences with the Southwest’s natural forms, especially because of the camping trips she made to remote areas."

[The exhibition contains] a couple of paintings, photographs and other documentation related to a 10-day raft trip O'Keeffe took down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon when she was 74. She made the trip more than once, knowing that it would never look the same once the dam was built and the canyons were flooded to form Lake Powell.

Kastner pointed to one image of O'Keeffe by photographer Todd Webb.

"It shows her beautiful artist hands, but they're at work, paddling a rubber raft down the river. It's extraordinary," she said.

Without modern amenities like GPS or four-wheel drive, O'Keeffe would set off alone or sometimes with friends to find her inspiration. There are stories of her bumping along primitive roads and finding refuge from the harsh sunlight in the back of her 1920s Ford Sedan. She would take out the driver's seat and turn the passenger seat around. It was just enough room to set up a 30-by-40-inch canvas.

Read the rest here.

More on the exhibition at The O'Keeffe Museum.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL