Still Alive for Me

I fell in love with Georgia O’Keefe’s work at first sight, when I was about 16 years old. In the light and movement of her canvases, she captured not just her own experiences, but expressed mine, impressions and evidence and interpretations of the gold and dust and brilliance of the American Southwest, where I had lived for a couple of years as a late preschooler and kindergartner, and where I visited my grandmother well into my adulthood. Now, 40+ years since my first encounter with O’Keefe’s work, I’m continuing to expand and deepen my understanding of her entire oeuvre, personal and professional, through the lens of my own developing art practice, my current research, and my own aging—she was in the last few years of her long, 98-year earthly life when I first found her.

We live within the contexts of our times and places and social contemporaries, but flow experiences transcend these constraints: loosening the bounds and perceptions of time; blurring the borders of built and natural environments; engaging us in intellectual and spiritual communication with our biological or influential ancestors, past or present. When we are motivated from within, exploring and creating for its own sake, we slip into a spiraling stream of progression and renewal, our productivity defying fixedness and maintaining relevance to others seeking and experimenting with autotelic authenticity. As we define and refine our agency, our biographies and our outputs—whether material or ephemeral, whether we ourselves are known or forgotten—may resonate well beyond our years on earth.