The Hammock Papers: Well-Lived.

13 June 2022

Well-Lived.

Varon, Georgia O’Keeffe at her home, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1977

On Malcolm Varon's exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life Well-Lived ...

In 1977 a correspondent from Art News arrived in Abiquiú to prepare a piece on “Georgia O’Keeffe at 90.” Upon arrival he discovered that there were no recent photographs of O’Keeffe available to illustrate the article, however, the photographer Malcolm Varon (O’Keeffe’s preferred art photographer) happened to be visiting. Varon shot more than 70 color images capturing not only portraits of the artist, but also of her life in Northern New Mexico. The magazine published five of the photographs. This exhibition brings together many of Varon’s unpublished images, capturing O’Keeffe during a far less documented period of her life, in full color, relaxed in the familiar home and landscape she loved so much.

CONNECT

Ariel Plotek, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Curator of Fine Art, and Barbara Buhler Lynes, Exhibition Co-Curator, discuss the photographs featured in the Georgia O’Keeffe, a Life Well-Lived: Photographs by Malcolm Varon ...

No comments:

Post a Comment

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