Portrait of an artist through her process

Published 3:46 pm Thursday, September 23, 2010

SANTA FE, N.M. — Beneath layers of paint, wrapped in bundles of brushes, hidden in sketch books and packed away among boxes of paints and pencils are clues that shed light on how Georgia O’Keeffe went about creating her colorful landscapes and iconic flower paintings.

Like forensic investigators, curators at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., have spent months combing through their collection for the exhibition “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials,” which runs through May.

O’Keeffe’s never-before-displayed art materials, preparatory drawings, Polaroids and a pair of unfinished paintings is designed to give visitors a better understanding of how the late American modernist transferred her ideas onto canvas.

The O’Keeffe Museum has a wealth of materials from the artist’s estate. At the time of her death in 1986, O’Keeffe’s two homes in northern New Mexico and most everything in them were set aside for preservation. That included her brushes, paint chips with notes jotted on the back, sketch books, canvases and hundreds of rocks and bleached animal bones she gathered over decades of exploring the high desert.

It was the job of associate curator Carolyn Kastner to search the museum’s climate-controlled vaults for clues to explain O’Keeffe’s very deliberate style.

Aside from the drawings O’Keeffe had organized in file folders, Kastner came across photographs O’Keeffe had taken of the same subjects from the same vantage points, just in different light and shadow.

“We can’t conjure a whole person out of this exhibition,” Kastner said, “but we can see the trace of her action on paper and canvas.”