Witness to the arc towards the sun

Graphic designer with a heart of gold. Sometime scribbler. Mermaid aficionado.

[witnesstothearctowardsthesun]

The tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler. Gouache and acrylic on paper, 2017.

[witnesstothearctowardsthesun]

[ithelpstodream]

[notyoujamie]

[met-drawings-prints]

Monstrosity of 1829: “Lo this is their very guise” by William Heath via Drawings and Prints

Medium: Hand-colored etching

Rogers Fund and The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1969 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/392124

[bunlly]

[simena]

[brooklynmuseum]

“I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself—I can’t live where I want to—I can’t go where I want to—I can’t do what I want to—I can’t even say what I want to. School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself—that was nobody’s business but my own.”

During her teaching years, Georgia O’Keeffe came into contact with the influential writings and pedagogy of Arthur Wesley Dow, a painter and printmaker who dismissed the idea of art as an imitative medium and advocated for modern abstraction. One of her first deliberate acts as a modernist was to reform the curricula she encountered in the Texas schools where she taught.

She threw out the textbooks that urged artists to copy nature and focused instead on the beauty of pattern and design. She liked to summarize Dow’s philosophy as “filling space in a beautiful way,” and this could be as mundane as where one placed a stamp on an envelope or how one dressed in clearly defined black and white shapes.

In 1916 a friend showed O’Keeffe’s first charcoal abstractions to Alfred Stieglitz, the influential photographer and champion of modern art. He found them so striking that he put a few of them in a group show in his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue and, in 1917, gave her a one-person exhibition.

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946). Georgia O’Keeffe at 291, 1917. Platinum print. @okeeffemuseum, Santa Fe, N.M.; Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum