Orlando and O’Keeffe:
Cross-Currents
Ghost Ranch 2015
Hi. I am Elisa Kay Sparks. I am a printmaker and an
academic. I specialize in
color-reduction woodcuts, often related to Virginia Woolf and /or Georgia
O’Keeffe. As an academic I publish on
Woolf and flowers and gardens and explore connections between Woolf and her
American contemporary.
Since
Woolf and O’Keeffe are kind of the inspirational goddesses behind AROHO at
Ghost Ranch, I thought I’d give you a brief overview of the connections between
them, hopefully in a way which may also serve as a bit of an intro to what
Woolf was trying to do in Orlando –
that brilliant but bewildering romp of a book.
Woolf
and O’Keeffe never met. In March of
1925, their works were neighbors, two of O’Keefe’s flagpole paintings (in black
& white) were placed (probably by Marianne Moore) next to an odd little
essay about a female entomologist by
Woolf in an issue of The Dial, a
transatlantic arts magazine which regularly reviewed the work of both women.[1] O’Keeffe certainly knew of Virginia Woolf,
probably through their mutual friend, the painter Dorothy Brett, who followed
D.H. Lawrence out to Taos and spent the last half of her life painting Native
American ceremonial dances. O’Keeffe had 5 books by Virginia Woolf in her
library at the time of her death, including Orlando
and a copy of To The Lighthouse sent
to her by Virginia’s niece, Angelica Garnett after a visit with O’Keefe in her
Abiquiu home in 1981.[2]
Aside
from these few attenuated links, the two women had much in common due in
part to their positions as the canonized
female modernist in their respective genres of painting and fiction. Although
Woolf was born five years earlier than O'Keeffe (in 1882 rather than 1887),
both did extensive reading and thinking about the attack on conventions of
realism in Post-Impressionist art theory and both were committed feminists who
sought to create a distinctly female rhetoric of modernism, experimenting with
how the shapes in a woman’s mind could be put on paper and how traditional
images and plots could be altered to create a feminine aesthetic expressing their rebellion
against gender conventions.
One
way to trace the similarities in the two women’s points of view is to look at
some of the notable experimental techniques and thematic concerns in Orlando and compare them with similar
methods and images used by O’Keeffe.
·
BOTH ARTISTS RADICALLY CHALLENGED GENRE CONVENTIONS in ways that also
challenged GENDER EXPECTATIONS. O’Keeffe took the traditionally feminine genre
of flower painting and exploded its gentle decorative realism into giant,
geometrical declarations of androgynous sexual imagination – flower parts big
enough to be carnivorous. Woolf took the traditional chronology of biography
and exploded its boundaries beyond the unitary self, substituting the dusty
begats of ancestry with the idea of a historically continuous self, composed of
many selves and variable sexes.
·
Both artists were also concerned with challenging expectations by
introducing radical new PERSPECTIVES, looking at things from different angles
and at different scales. Both share the
interest in what is small and every day and often ignored, specializing in the
startling close-up detail. There is
little middle ground in either artist’s work: either we get intimate intense
close-ups or we get panoramic vistas, with the two often confusingly
juxtaposed. Compare O’Keeffe’s vast desert vistas with a close-up of a hovering
bone or flower to Woolf’s panoramas of the Great Frost or Augustan London,
punctuated with details of jewels and costumes, shades of light, people’s face
in a crowd.
·
Both women also often delight in turning expectations on their heads. One
way that O’Keeffe subverts traditional realism is by re-orienting her
canvases. Some of her most enigmatic,
compositions become readable landscapes when turned on their sides. And
sometimes her flowers turn into portraits. The shifting referentiality of
O'Keeffe's orientations is similar to how Woolf “typically
employs allusive, unlocateable speakers” (Homans 3), providing us in Orlando with a traditional biographer
whose clearly limited and highly ironic point
of view is confusingly mingled with that of another narrator who knows a good deal more, as well as
Orlando him/her self who also seems to have rather incomplete access to the contents
of his/her own mind. Neither
artist wants us to be sure of where the I/eye is. [3]
·
As part of their exploration of perspective, both artists often work in
SEQUENCES, looking at the same subject not only from different angles but also
in different contexts or at different levels of abstraction or knowledge. Think of O’Keeffe’s famous series of
Jack-in-the-pulpits, which move from realism through stages of abstraction to a
singular focus on only the spathe at the center of the jack. This is similar to how Woolf takes Orlando
through various time periods: who would Orlando be as a boy? As the Turkish
ambassador? Returning to England as a woman? In the Victorian Age? In the
Present Day?
Both
women were outsiders: O’Keeffe as woman painter; Woolf as a lesbian
writer. Both fought against the
censorship of their gender identities. In order to combat the
over-Freudianization of her abstractions which were taken to be literal
equivalents to her female body, O’Keeffe defiantly took to painting the
startlingly hermaphroditic sex organs of giant plants. Brilliantly out-maneuvering those who would
censor her love letter to another woman, Woolf created a hero who could
legitimately love a woman as a woman because he once had been a man. Both women have much to teach us about seeing
against the current, the current day as well as the currency of convention.
[1] See my article “The
Dial as Matrix: Periodical Community between Virginia Woolf and Georgia
O’Keeffe.” Virginia Woolf & Communities: Selected Papers from the Eight Annual
Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed.
Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis.
Pace University Press, 2000. Also
my website charting their connections in The
Dial:
http://people.clemson.edu/~sparks/dial/
[2] For more on the connections between Bloomsbury and
the American southwest, see my article
“"Bloomsbury West: London Bohemians Find a New World in the
American Southwest," in Woolf Editing / Editing Woolf: Selected Papers
from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Eleanor McNees
and Sara Veglahn. Clemson University Digital Press, 2009. 160-5
[3] My first attempt to systematically compare Woolf and
O’Keeffe’s stlytistic feminism was in "'A Match Burning in a Crocus':
Modernism, Feminism, and Feminine Experience in Virginia Woolf and Georgia
O'Keeffe." In Virginia Woolf: Themes
and Variations: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia
Woolf. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey, eds. NYC: Pace UP, 1994. 296‑302.
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