![]() ![]() These imaginative, quasi-surreal compositions often incorporate abstract and landscape elements, underscoring the innate energy she believed the bones possessed, in addition to their eternal spiritual ties to their native arid environs. From the Faraway, Nearby and related pictures attest to O’Keeffe’s artistic engagement with bones, usually extended well beyond conventional still life painting. Indeed, the desert detritus provided distinctive, signature subjects and populate some of her most revered canvases, including, as one particularly iconic example, Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around-hair, eyes and all with their tails switching." The painter famously collected, displayed as decor, and painted what she provocatively described on more than one occasion as the boney "trash" littering the desert, so strikingly different from the kinds of urban litter she would have known along the streets of New York City. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. ![]() So I brought home the bleached bones as my symbols of the desert. I always think that I cannot stay with it long enough. The painter expounded on their allure in a 1939 exhibition brochure essay, explaining, "I have wanted to paint the desert and I haven’t known how. A key component of O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic association with the southwestern United States, particularly New Mexico, was her attraction to animal bones. ![]()
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