To See Takes Time
some art and some art thoughts
Last week I carved out an hour in order to preview “To See Takes Time,” the new Georgia O’Keeffe show at the MoMA. Grand in scope though modest in size (it’s really just a few rooms, which elegantly direct you along a roughly chronological path), the show focuses on O’Keeffe’s works on paper — charcoals, pastels, pencils, watercolors. Many are studies, or sketches, works made for future reference. Some just seem like noodling, like she saw something and tried to set it down a bunch of ways till she captured it just right.
Having spent chunks of many summers in Santa Fe, I’ve been to the O’Keeffe Museum there at least a few times. (It’s really lovely.) That museum focuses on her paintings, and there are a lot of the more familiar works: mountains, skulls, and of course flowers, which most people associate with O’Keeffe. This was everything that isn’t that.
I loved the show. I will probably go back again.
I was struck, most of all, by the abstraction. The art was all about finding the shapes and lines, and sometimes colors, that evoke what O’Keeffe was seeing. There were drawings of the buildings outside her New York window. Images of curves and curls, and nothing else.
According to the tag next to one of them, O’Keeffe told a friend it was the “drawing of a headache,” a “very bad headache at the time that I was busy drawing every night, sitting on the floor in front of the closet door.”
Sometimes you look at something for a while and realize it’s a train approaching, or the morning sky (which, indeed, is a watercolor abstraction). Even when she starts to turn toward flowers, there’s a deliberate flatness to the work that brings out some essential quality.
This is what I love about abstract work, of all stripes. Most artwork that betrays too much fidelity to reality, too much attempt to replicate and mimic, loses its artist in the mix. It becomes about looking at a familiar thing, rather than looking at how someone else looks at a familiar thing.
This is hardly an insight that I alone have, but it’s one I sometimes find myself having to repeat to others, because it tells you what you are looking at when you look at good art, no matter what kind of art it is. You are looking not at an objective representation of something; you are looking through someone else’s eyes. A book that makes you uncomfortable might be doing that because it’s uncomfortable to view the world through eyes that are not your own.
Recently Tom asked me how I’d define art, which is something I routinely do in one of my courses, but I knew he wasn’t asking for that definition. The one that popped out of my head, surprising me, was that art is a mode of seeing, a way of knowing, for some people. But the miracle is that, as opposed to some other ways of seeing and thinking, those who don’t make art in order to apprehend the world can “borrow” the eyes of those who do. There’s a human meeting ground in art that doesn’t quite exist for other ways of knowing and being. It’s why I fight to spend my life with it.
But it’s not instant. You have to have patience. “To see takes time” is O’Keeffe’s line, and the phrase is followed up by this one: “like to have a friend takes time.”
Which is why I’ll be going back.
Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.
"But the miracle is that, as opposed to some other ways of seeing and thinking, those who don’t make art in order to apprehend the world can “borrow” the eyes of those who do. There’s a human meeting ground in art that doesn’t quite exist for other ways of knowing and being."
Love this!