The Christmas Present in 1976 that introduced me to Georgia O’Keeffe

Because I paint large flowers, people naturally say, “Oh, you must like Georgia O’Keeffe.” What they don’t know is that Georgia’s work drew me in not through her flowers but through her abstractions and her skulls. The sensuality of her forms triggered me. I was moved deeply by her lightened color palette. I’d never seen paintings that had that lightness, that buoyancy. They had a girlie-girl feel to them. I didn’t have the language to understand what moved me at the time. I probably still don’t. But her work made me feel like a woman—a soft, light, gentle free spirit.

I was a late starter, going to college at the age of 27. My youngest son was going to preschool, so I had some time to pursue something besides being a mommy that grabbed my soul. I began a YMCA oil painting class, and my teacher, a generous, gifted, and kind French woman, urged me to study in more depth. She saw something in me I didn’t know I had.

On Christmas in 1976, I received a present that changed the course of my life. It was the first coffee-table book published by Georgia O’Keeffe. On the cover was a stunning painting of a skull that changed everything I’d seen in art up to that point. It was gorgeous and inspirational to me.

I would weep at her images in that book. They spoke directly to my soul like no other art had ever spoken to me. In my late twenties, I first realized that paintings didn’t have to be narratives. Showing us how people lived or what they looked like. Art could make you think. Open your mind. Let you seek meaning within yourself. Stir questions that had never occurred to you before. They could open windows of thought into your mind and your very soul.

Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Marble Table by Rachel Ruysch (c. 1704)

I fell in love with Georgia’s white bones. They spoke to me of Life, of Death, of Eternity. In my classrooms with real skulls and at home with my plastic replicas, I took to drawing skulls. The subtle nuances of shading. The openings for eyes. The hollows and crevices. I felt that these skulls spoke to what was underneath our skin. What sturdiness we were made from. What held us together. A hidden part of ourselves. Her bones against the sky spoke to me of the eternity of life. The energy we dissolve into when we are no longer alive. A transition from being alive. The remnants of who we were when we left as a remembrance of sorts. The blue sky shining through those hollow bones. A signal of transition to another plane of existence.

There is another connection I felt with Georgia’s skulls. As the first generation of my family to be born outside of the Netherlands since the 1600s, I have, of course long been attracted to the vanitas paintings of the Dutch painters. Rachel Ruysch was a painter from the late 1600s into the 1700s who specialized in painting intricate and detailed floral bouquets. Because the Dutch were more of a secular nation, their work focused on symbols to express meaning rather than religious subjects, which predominated in other countries. Often, skulls were included in Dutch floral still life paintings, as well as different representations of the fleeting nature of life. Upon close inspection, you will find beetles, ants, and insects nestled amongst the flowers. You’ll discover past-prime deterioration in the petals. These vanitas images reminded the viewers of fragility of life. These are the dark paintings I’d been somewhat aware of until Georgia’s work burst into my sight with sunlight.

Marilyn (Vanitas) by Audrey Flack (1977)

At about the same time Georgia came into my life in the late 1970s, my extraordinary art history professor, Patricia Hills, began introducing us to contemporary women artists working in what would eventually be called the second wave of feminism. The two artists whose work spoke the loudest to me were Judy Chicago with her ground-breaking installation, The Dinner Party. I, along with thousands of other women, made a pilgrimage to see the work at the Brooklyn Museum, where I began to realize that hundreds and thousands of women throughout the world had been written out of history.

The photorealist Audrey Flack announced herself to me loudly with her large, air-brushed, and detailed paintings presented in a lightened palette of colors. This new take on the Baroque vanitas paintings of Ruysch filled me with ideas & expanded my vision in ways I’d never even considered. Her painting, Marilyn (Vanitas) of 1977, riffed on the subjects of transience and mortality. I realized that I was interested in painting ideas rather than painting objects. I wanted to stimulate thoughts, ideas, and conversations as these women had done for me.

I continue to walk boldly in the fading footsteps begun by these women. They showed me the immense courage it would take to keep creating my own vision, in my own way, in my own style. The world didn’t need their art. The world doesn’t need my art. But we need to create it, to put it out there to open the conversations, to spread ideas, to make statements, to provide warnings and to joyously celebrate being alive.

Originally posted in Sanctuary Magazine in March 2025.