A red hill
I ran across this quote on my way through New Mexico and Arizona. I meant to post it then; here it is now.
"Well - I made you take the time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don't always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine and I supposed there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away outside my door - hill after hill - red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens.
You have no associations with those hills - our waste land - I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me to always to paint flowers...."
-- Georgia O'Keeffe in Exhibition Catalogue, An American Place, 1939
Seattle is very beautiful. There are fruit trees on every block, and rosemary grows like a tree rather than a bush. I clipped some new growth from the plant at Erica's house and put it in water--four days later it is already sending out little white fingers into the water. When it gets bigger we'll be able to plant it in a pot. I miss the red dirt, though. I'll go back someday.
Life is pretty okay. The apartment is really great, more than big enough for the two of us. We cook and bake and read. Money is very, very tight and I am looking for a second job (or third, if you count extremely sporadic graphic design 'gigs').
That's all for now, I guess.
"Well - I made you take the time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.
Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don't always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine and I supposed there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away outside my door - hill after hill - red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens.
You have no associations with those hills - our waste land - I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me to always to paint flowers...."
-- Georgia O'Keeffe in Exhibition Catalogue, An American Place, 1939
Seattle is very beautiful. There are fruit trees on every block, and rosemary grows like a tree rather than a bush. I clipped some new growth from the plant at Erica's house and put it in water--four days later it is already sending out little white fingers into the water. When it gets bigger we'll be able to plant it in a pot. I miss the red dirt, though. I'll go back someday.
Life is pretty okay. The apartment is really great, more than big enough for the two of us. We cook and bake and read. Money is very, very tight and I am looking for a second job (or third, if you count extremely sporadic graphic design 'gigs').
That's all for now, I guess.