A Poet with a Paintbrush Georgia O’Keeffe and Blue

A Poet with a Paintbrush: Georgia O’Keeffe and Blue and Green Music

CHRISTINA MARTINEZ

IN THE EARLY 1920s, American artist Georgia O’Keeffe made several paintings based on the “idea that music could be translated into something for the eye” (The Art Institute of Chicago). This idea may be familiar to us ekphrastic poets, who see art and attempt to translate its beauty into our own medium so that we can describe our reaction to our chosen work. In O’Keeffe’s case, she endeavored to invent a corporeal form for music, translating this invention into the oils on her canvas. Just as we poets want to imitate art by applying words to a page, O’Keeffe strived to imitate music and its beauty; her paintbrush was her instrument. Blue and Green Music is one of these attempts, a study of music with the goal to unlock synesthesia. After close observation, I believe this work is both a poem and a symphony. The shapes, colors, and textures of O’Keeffe’s composition successfully create a synesthetic experience possible only through art. Most people with working knowledge of O’Keeffe’s significance in the art world and her overall contribution to Americana can attest to her fame for her observations of flowers and natural landscapes. O’Keeffe’s greatest works capture photographic fantasies only possible through her meticulous eye towards all aspects of the natural world. Even with the abstractness in the expression of music, her skill molds it into familiar shapes of nature. O’Keeffe transformed melody into tangibility with strokes of oil paint, capturing music’s profound effect to grow new feelings and sensations for human beings. In Blue and Green Music, this growth is represented as floral flourishes. The way the shapes emerge suggests O’Keeffe’s belief that music blossoms from natural observations of life, whether from the earth where humans were made or the release of a trumpet’s roar.

The twin colors of Blue and Green Music are synonymous with the title, and aid in symbolizing O’Keeffe’s idea. Blues and greens

CHRISTINA MARTINEZ (’21) is a senior English major. She wrote this essay for Sarah Maclay’s Ekphrastic Poetry course in Fall 2020. Her essay utilizes processes of ekphrastic poetry to analyze Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music.

O’KEEFFE, GEORGIA. BLUE AND GREEN MUSIC. 1919-21. THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO,

HTTPS://WWW.ARTIC.EDU/ARTWORKS/24306/BLUE-AND-GREEN-MUSIC.

of multiple shades compose the shape of the floral music, but they are nestled around an unnamed and centered prominence of white. The combinations of these colors convey a “vibrancy” of music and support the qualities of life observed in the painting so far. The composition reflects the familiar structure of a bloom. From the bottom corner, tinges of green simmer up through a bulb into a dark blue-and-green cone, holding wisps of white, like lily petals. This embellishes O’Keeffe’s portrayed music as emergent and rich, as if it is building up to its climax. This climax is white, traditionally a color signifying purity, perhaps suggesting the aura of music, but it also serves a second function as a spectrum-producing prism that holds all colors in its light. This signifies that the blues and greens of the painting must unite to create the cohesiveness of music. Despite only including three base colors in this painting, O’Keeffe harnesses their full power to express music’s harmony with life and the natural world. O’Keeffe utilizes colors to convey emotion, science, and existing philosophies as a way to trace the path of musical development and worth.

The textures of Blue and Green Music cannot be overlooked, as they add dimension to

this colorful path and trace the footprints that music leaves upon the human experience. We can find this trailhead by peering just outside of the flower-cone, where O’Keeffe has stacked pale green squiggles like serrated coral. These lines crest like traditional diagrams of sound waves, but they are shadowed with depth. O’Keeffe agrees that music is simply sound, but a collection of many sources of it. Music must marry sounds together into a continuous unit, just as O’Keeffe has done here. These sound waves feed into the flower-cone like an amplifier, further emphasizing the shape and progress of music. The strokes of the blue cone are solid, harsh, and angled, much like paper or a book. The paint is thick, but flat, like sheet music or the structure of a song. However, O’Keeffe draws how the structure gives birth to the pure white of music by painting strokes like whiffs of smoke. They disperse, thin out, and fade into the painting’s central void like a song that is played to a concert crowd in an arena. This is a representation of the prevalence, infectiousness, and universality of music that derives its structure to become shapeless and nothing more than bliss and medicine for the soul. O’Keeffe must have carefully planned each stroke in Blue and Green Music to detail the timeless and synesthetic journey of music.

Blue and Green Music serves as a highlight of O’Keeffe’s body of work and solidifies her craft as beautiful, visionary, and astounding; emblematic as to why she is one of the United States’ most celebrated artists. Though it is right to commend O’Keeffe for her awe-inspiring re-creations of flowers and landscapes, we must appreciate the thoughtfulness and care in her early abstract works like Blue and Green Music. Expressing meaning through abstract art is a challenge, yet O’Keeffe takes it on effortlessly, elevating music as if it were any still life painting. Even in this stillness, the movement, the noise, and the lifeblood of music are loud and effective. The complete result of these elements is a piece that allows an audience a new perspective on a familiar concept and grapples with new philosophies about it. These epiphanies bear O’Keeffe’s incredible gift to push a unique angle and express it in artistic form, just as if she were a poet. O’Keeffe’s craft and methods may elevate her own ideas into universal fact: it is true that music can be “translated into something for the eye.” «