How Georgia Became O'Keeffe Read Online Free PDF Page B

from their mortgages, etc., etc. Sound familiar?
    * By which I mean women who made their living by their art. There were many women, old and young, who loved to paint, and did so to entertain and enrich themselves, without a thought to selling their work. Working in watercolors was so popular among women that when O’Keeffe’s friend and colleague John Marin began using them, his paintings were initially dismissed by critics as being lightweight and inconsequential.
    â€ â€  Naturalistic depictions of gentle landscapes and dignified peasants in soothing neutrals.
    â€¡â€¡ Too tortured, too crazy, too much lead paint.
    Â§Â§ As of this writing considered to be the most successful artist in the world; in 2008, his Golden Calf —a real cow tricked out with gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde—sold for about $17 million.
    Â¶Â¶ My own mom complained when I was underfoot, and was happiest when I occupied myself by playing in the neighborhood “until the streetlights came on.” That this was almost 10:00 p.m. during the summer made no difference to her. If she occasionally had to rush me to the emergency room (where we were on a first-name basis with the staff) because I’d leapt from a secret tree house and snagged my nostril on a protruding nail on the way down, that was simply the price we had to pay for her special brand of free-range parenting.
    ** The pressure to force-feed our children enrichment activities like a French goose on his way to becoming pâté has been well documented. Our fear, as mothers, is that failing to overmanage our children’s time will doom them to a life lived out of a shopping cart beneath a bridge. No one means well more than a modern mother.
    â€ â€ â€  When O’Keeffe was living and teaching in Canyon, Texas, her favorite way to relax was shooting tin cans out on the prairie.
    â€¡â€¡â€¡ Or in this day of gummy worms and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, is it possible for a raisin to even qualify as a delicious treat?

Georgia O’Keeffe
    American (1887–1986)
Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot), 1908
Oil on canvas, 19 x 23½ in.
    Permanent collection, The Art Students League of New York

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    The best course is the one that leaves my mind freest.

    It took Georgia a year to recover from typhoid. If the only brush you’ve ever had with this disease was enduring mild flu-like symptoms and a hot, throbbing arm after having received the required vaccine before jetting off to Southeast Asia or some other part of the developing world, where the locals die of it on a regular basis, here is a quick overview.
    The first week you experience a high fever, headache, and cough. The second week features a higher fever, diarrhea, and delirium, and maybe an itchy and unsightly rash. The third week can bring complications in the form of intestinal hemorrhaging and metastatic abscesses. I’m not sure what that last one is, but you know it can’t be fun. All of these symptoms proceed into the fourth week where, if you’ve managed to survive, the fever slowly abates and you’re left, as Georgia was, with no hair.
    During her months of recovery she read Faust in a lace cap that covered her bald head and made desultory sketches of her younger siblings—the older ones having all left home to start their lives. Even if she’d wanted to return to the Art Institute of Chicago, in September when classes began she was still too weak to go back, and the family finances worsened with each successive failed business undertaken by her father. The grocery went belly-up, followed by a creamery. There was a brief foray into real estate. Mostly, he was becoming more despondent and alienating the locals with his inexplicable Yankee ways. Ida, her mother, daughter of the genuine Hungarian count, who believed Williamsburg was going to be a step up from Wisconsin farm life (even though the local ladies