Life In The Arts
Meet Georgia O'Keeffe
Wednesday, February 13, 2002 - 10:30 - 11:30 AM
LONGTIMERS PRODUCTIONS AND THE MONTEREY COUNTY OFFICE OF EDUCATION PRESENT
PROGRAM GUEST
Melissa Pickford will impersonate artist Georgia O 'Keeffe in authentic costume.
"Georgia "will help students draw oil pastel flowers or bones in her own style. Melissa Pickford grew up watching her father dedicate his life to art.He was a constant source of inspiration and encouragement to explore all the arts, especially painting.Because art was the center of her family life,she often drew and painted as a child.Her family spent time in art museums,and she learned to be comfortable viewing and talking about art. At Boston University,she naturally gravitated towards a degree in Art History.After a rich academic experience in New England she missed California weather and landscape and returned to live on the Central Coast.She received teaching credentials at UC Santa Cruz.Her deep love for children and art led her to a career in art education.She has always enjoyed sharing the life of great artists with her students, sometimes dressing to impersonate artists from history.
After several years teaching elementary school as an art specialist,she is currently the Assistant Director of Education at the Monterey Museum of Art.There she divides her time between traveling to schools with the Museum on Wheels, a mobile international folk art exhibit, and teaching art classes at the museum.
STUDENT PROJECT
MATERIALS NEEDED for OIL PASTEL FLOWERS:
12 " x 18 " white construction paper
Oil pastels,assorted colors (crayons are OK,too)
Linseed oil (optional,to be used with oil pastels for a
more blended,fluid look)
Kleenex tissues
Q-tips
Pencils (optional)
Books or posters of Georgia O 'Keeffe 's paintings-for inspiration!
Real flowers and or animal bones.
Melissa Pickford will impersonate artist Georgia
O 'Keeffe in authentic costume."Georgia " will help
students draw oil pastel flowers or bones in her own style.
Lesson Plan
1. Show students several paintings by Georgia O 'Keeffe. Notice her soft colors and clearly-drawn shapes, sometimes of flowers, bones, earthforms and/or sky. Tell students that hers were oil paintings but that they will be using oil pastels to draw.Students should try to imitate O 'Keeffe 's style (enlarged, bold, simple, soft color, minimal detail). It 's even OK to directly copy one of her paintings.
2. Using a light color like peach,white or tan, draw the basic shape of a flower.
MAKE IT MUCH LARGER THAN LIFE, FILLING THE WHOLE PAGE with the flower 's shape.
3. Begin to fill in color in the center of the flower and on its petals, using a few different colors blended softly with your finger or some tissue. Make some areas of your color lighter, some darker. Leave a little white.
4. After you have filled in most of the color, you can use a Q-tip dipped in linseed oil to blend your oil pastel strokes for a softer look.
5. Try a blue sky as a background if you have any white paper space showing around your flower, or just leave it white (O 'Keeffe did both).
6. Don 't worry about drawing the perfect flower it doesn 't have to be an exactly accurate picture of a real flower. The idea is to be expressive of what a flower FEELS like, and to try to capture thecolor and spirit of O 'Keeffe 's paintings!
A BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGIA O 'KEEFFE:
Georgia O 'Keeffe was born in 1887,the second of seven children and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, she has determined to make her way as an artist.
O 'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League in New York, where she was quick to master imitative realism (drawing things as realistically as possible).Though she won awards during her studies for her ability to paint realistic oils, she felt restricted by having to work within this tradition.She quit making art for several years, saying that she could never achieve distinction while working in a purely representational style. Her interest in art was rekindled four years later when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia.Her teacher,on faculty at Columbia (New York)Teachers College,introduced her to the (then) revolutionary ideas of his Columbia colleague, artist Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist 's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and contrast between lights and darks. Dow 's ideas offered O 'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism, and she experimented with them for two years while she taught art Texas public schools. O 'Keeffe was in New York again from 1914 to June 1915, taking courses at Teachers College. By the fall of 1915, when she was teaching art at a college in South Carolina,she decided to put Dow 's theories to test. In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. She mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate,who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieg-litz.
Stieglitz began corresponding with O 'Keeffe, who returned to New York to attend classes at Teachers College, and he exhibited 10 of her charcoal abstractions in May at his famous avant-garde gallery, "291 ". A year later he closed the doors of that important exhibition space with a one-person exhibit of O 'Keeffe 's work. In the spring of 1918 her offered O 'Keeffe financial support to paint for a year in New York,which she accepted,moving there from Texas. Shortly after her arrival In June, she and Stieglitz fell in love,and married in 1924. They lived and worked together in New York until 1929,when O 'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico. From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O 'Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art atseveral New York Galleries.
As early as the mid-1920 's,when O 'Keeffe first began painting large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close-up,which are among her best known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America 's most important and successful artists.O 'Keeffe made of a flower, with all its fragility, a permanent image without season,wilt or decay. Enlarged and reconstructed in oil on canvas or pastel on paper, it is a vehicle for pure expression rather than an example of botanical illustration.In her art, fleeting effects of natural phenomena or personal emotion become symbols, permanent points of reference.
Three years after Stieglitz 'death, O 'Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. She lived at her Ghost Ranch house, and then at the house she purchased in Abiquiu in 1945. O 'Keeffe continued to work until the late 1970 's, when failing eyesight forced her to abandon painting.She then became a three-dimensional artist, producing objects in clay until her health failed in 1984.She died two years later,at the age of 98.
SUGGESTED READING LIST
BOOKS
The Art and Life of Georgia O 'Keeffe
by Jan Garden Castro
Georgia O 'Keeffe:A Life
by Roxanna Robinson
Georgia O 'Keeffe:Catalogue Raisonne
by Barbara Buhler Lynes
Georgia O 'Keeffe:The Poetry of Things
by Elizabeth Hutton Turner
The Georgia O 'Keeffe Museum
edited by Peter H.Hassrick.
WEBSITES
http://ellensplace.net/okeeffe1.html
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/okeeffe_georgia.html
http://artchive.com/artchive/O/okeefe.html
http://greatamericanwomen.com/okeeffe.htm
CAREER CORNER
School to Work Transition
The service sector offers a myriad of career opportunities for people with a variety of talents,skills and abilities. Here are some examples. Pick one that interests you and explore it as a career possibility. Does the person do on a daily basis? What educational background and work experience is necessary? Is the work done? What are the rewards?
You may be surprised by what you find!
Current career information can be found on the Internet as well as at your school Career Center. You may want to interview a member of the community that is currently working in one of these professions.
Landscape Design
Interior Decoration
Fashion Design
Textile Design
Web Site Design
FOCUS QUESTIONS
How would you describe Georgia O 'Keeffe 's paintings (the colors, textures, design, moods,)
Why do you think Georgia painted flowers in the way she did?
What did painting mean to her?
What was Georgia like as a person?
What does her example of an independent life teach us?
What other women artists do you know?