Georgia O’Keeffe, A Piece of Wood II/From Knot of Wood

0:00:05.2 Steven Zucker: We’re in the Hudson River Museum looking at a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe called A Piece of Wood II. And it’s from the Knot of Wood series. There are four canvases. I would assume that what the artist has done is to find a knot in a piece of wood and to see its turns and its complexities, and then to begin to paint an abstract image that is referencing that natural phenomenon, blowing it out of scale and perhaps transforming it and making it into a painting. One that is still rooted in that direct observation of this small detail in nature.

0:00:42.1 Laura Vookles: She wasn’t taking nature and distilling it down to something geometric, but it was more like it was an abstraction that evoked her feelings of being in presence with that natural object. So it’s large, it’s living, it’s full of movement and different colors that she is bringing to the fore so that you see it too.

0:01:05.1 Steven Zucker: And like with her flower paintings, when we look at this painting of a knot in a piece of wood, I get the sense that her interest is not in fidelity to that flower, to this piece of wood. She’s taking that as a jumping off point. She’s looking at the forms of nature and then creating a work of art from that. And look at the way that on this flat surface, she’s able to, with just a few different tones of gray and brown, create this incredible sense of volume, a sense of smoothness. It’s a kind of breathtaking complexity that she’s able to wring out of the simplest colors and the simplest forms.

0:01:47.5 Laura Vookles: It’s also interesting that it flows off of the canvas. So you get a sense of it extending beyond, and then you’re not sure where it stops, if you’re looking inward. I think it’s a piece that everyone can look at and take something else away from. Maybe something different every time. I was just thinking when you were describing the colors, how evocative they are of flesh, and the painterliness of them is almost like the softness of flesh. And I started thinking of the center as being a womb. That is probably nothing that Georgia O’Keeffe intended. But these shapes and these forms are so universal. Everyone can get something out of it.

0:02:26.3 Steven Zucker: One of the things that Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of nature do, I think so successfully, is they get us to slow down. And just as she’s looking carefully, she gets us to slow down and for us to look carefully. And the composition here is allied with that. It is bringing us from the periphery into the center. But it’s not a single center. There are, in fact, two knots within this, one that seems to revolve around the other. In fact, so much so that this almost becomes not so much a piece of wood as almost biological, something at the cellular level.

0:03:00.1 Laura Vookles: There’s a famous quote about the flowers where she said, 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.” That tells you a little bit about Georgia O’Keeffe. I mean, she made these universal images that we all have so many reactions to. But she also was a very private person who sort of had her own thought of what she was bringing to her art.

0:03:33.1 Steven Zucker: But nevertheless, she’s inviting us to see what she sees.

0:03:36.6 Laura Vookles: Like she said, “I’ll paint what I see, what the flower is to me, but I’ll paint it big. And they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”