Painting with O’Keeffe

Painting with O’Keeffe

When a world-famous artist begins to lose her eyesight and puts down her brushes, it is a tragedy. When she starts to paint again, it must surely be a miracle. “What are those colors?” I asked, shouting over the wind. O’Keeffe raised her eyes skyward, resting both hands on the cane. She looked slowly all around, squinting against the flying sand, her white dress flapping loudly. Then she lowered her eyes toward me. “You tell me what they are,” she said. At first I thought she was jesting. I knew she could see them, or I thought she could. But she waited patiently, looking at me. I turned back to the sky. “They’re like pastels.” I stopped, focusing on one cloud near to us. “This cloud is like a grainy orange and red―no, it’s more like a peach, with yellows in there too.” I gestured widely. It seemed as if one color was superimposed on traces of another. The air was full of fragrances enhanced by a hint of moisture and sharpened by the wind as it passed quickly over the surface of sage and stone, sand and piñon. Somehow, all that was part of what I saw. “But there are reds, too.” I struggled to think of how to describe the colors. “There is a gray or white behind the reds; and some orange.” O’Keeffe’s head declined slightly as she listened, her lips creased in a faint smile. In late summer 1975, John Poling left college to wander the beauty of northern New Mexico and wound up in Abiquiu doing odd jobs for Georgia O’Keeffe. Never did he imagine that one day O’Keeffe’s request for help in preparing a canvas would lead to a two-year collaboration that would prove the most rewarding yet most painful of his life. A small, disturbing snapshot of a book about Georgia O'Keeffe, written by a man who worked as her studio assistant for two summers and helped her complete several paintings. Poling (who now teaches philosophy and theology at St. Olafs College) first met the elderly O'Keeffe when her driver stopped to give him a lift to the grocery store in Abiquiu, N.M. Months later, O'Keeffe's personal secretary hired him to house-sit for her and repaint her window trim. Both the chance meeting and the job at O'Keeffe's compound seemed wildly fortuitous: that summer of 1976, Poling gradually stopped painting trim on the artist's house and began painting her canvases. The two of them spent some months working together: O'Keeffe directing and instructing, Poling immersing himself in her art. The association, however, was to be short-lived, since O'Keeffe's assistant, Juan Hamilton, became extremely jealous of their association. Poling left, but he could not walk away; nor, it seems, could he forgive the fact that O'Keeffe chose not to divulge the extent of their collaboration. ``I felt with despair that my attempts to have the facts acknowledged had never had a chance,'' he writes. For her part, O'Keeffe staunchly defended her right to ignore him: ``Mr. Poling was the equivalent of a palette knife,'' she told a reporter at the time. ``He was nothing but a tool.'' Her proud dismissal so hurt Poling he became somewhat obsessed with documenting and proving his participation in her work. This book could itself be seen as a final, wistful effort to assert his involvement. And as much as it may be appropriate to clarify their work collaboration, Poling's vehemenceafter all these yearsverges on the bizarre. O'Keeffe certainly could be cruel, but it would take much more objectivity and detachment than Poling musters here to understand why the artist spurned him so thoroughly. Although Poling provides an unusually intimate glimpse of O'Keeffe at work, his book is less about her than it is about him and how betrayed he felt when she refused to acknowledge his assistance. (11 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Used Book in Good Condition