Georgia on my mind

This magnificent flower has been attracting my camera like a moth over the past few days as its turgid buds have swollen and unfolded in the conservatory . It's a Hippeastrum (native to south and central America) that has emerged once again, after several years dormancy, from a bulb that came from someone locally. My pot plants aren't exactly nurtured and this one endures alternate freezing and boiling temperatures year in, year out. But it's come up trumps this year with a bloom that can only be described in superlatives, most of them erotic. I have been shooting into its creamy, fleshy, carmine-veined orifice from all angles and making the pollen-dusted stamens quiver and shiver. How could this extraordinary organ of reproduction emerge from a scrubby-looking lump of vegetable matter?

The Georgia it brings to my mind is not the state but the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe who died in 1986 at the age of 98. A large portion of her early work was devoted to paintings of flowers often on a large scale and closely focused on the intimate anatomy of the blooms. Naturally these images were pounced on as symbolic of her own sexual identity but she always strongly denied it.

...Well, I made you take 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.

Although she was born in Wisconsin, O'Keeffe spent the last 40 years of her life living mostly alone on a ranch in New Mexico, working on her art, walking in the desert with her dogs and tending her sun-baked garden. I spent a few days in New Mexico some years ago and it appealed me more strongly than any other state I have visited. The luminosity of the sky, the arid landscape and the coarse, pungent vegetation reminded me so strongly of the mediterranean terroir.

You can see a sample of her themes here at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe which has a large collection of her paintings and also of her fine photography. Her fascination with natural forms, not only flowers but skulls, shells, stones and the scenery around her, is obvious in both. She appeals to me as an artist for that reason and for the way she led her life, shunning contact with the art world and rejecting media attention. (That she looked starkly beautiful into old age can be seen in this photo by Karsh.)

Also, because she said
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.

And
I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.