The meaning of a word — to me — is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. – Georgia O’Keeffe
Abiquiú, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Taos home-studio (which she bought in 1945, and made her permanent residence in 1949) still stands as a testament the artist’s dedication to weaving her surroundings with her creative practice. Like her artwork, the house, a traditional adobe (mud-brick) hacienda, was a meticulous composition. Its original features, some of which dated back to the 18th century, were masterfully joined together with a keen eye for mid-century modern design and an enduring affinity with the New Mexico landscape. The images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s home have become an iconic example of living and breathing at the intersection of art and design with no compromises. Its huge, architecturally engineered picture windows play with scale and the sensation of threshold between inside and out, while inside, carefully arranged objects are placed in fluid relation to one another, creating a kind blueprint of modern style that incorporates the wild parameters of nature.
For O’Keeffe, there was no distinction between living space, surroundings, and art-making. She often made studies of the architecture of the places she lived in and around. The House I Live In (1937), which she painted of her first New Mexico home, Ghost Ranch, documents a period when she was still living part-time in the city, but becoming increasingly immersed in the stark shapes and contours of the ‘Wild West’. In the later Patio with Cloud (1956), made once she had taken up residence permanently in New Mexico and one of series of works depicting doorways, the transition is complete. The home, enveloped by endless skies and hulking, pastel-layered mountains, has become part-muse, part-sanctuary, and always a place for quiet, still contemplation. Of the American desert, O’Keeffe said; ‘When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.’
O’Keeffe may always be best known for her flower paintings (which constitute a relatively small part of her oeuvre), but the last decade or so has seen a corrective shift in attention towards her landscapes, thanks in part to expansive retrospectives at the Tate and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. For O’Keeffe the scope of the landscape for abstraction and exploration was limitless – in her own words; ‘It’s as if my mind creates shapes that I didn’t know about.'