O'Keeffe, the Outline of Dry Air

One

One bone fills the whole surface.

A pelvis.
From a cow.

There is a hole in the middle.
A hole the bone has of itself.

Through that hole the sky is seen.
It is blue.

Very blue.
Nowhere muddied.

The bone is white.
But not only white.

There are places where blue runs through it and places where yellow runs through it.
It differs with the angle the light comes from.

There is no background.

No ground and no horizon.
Only bone and sky.

It is large.

Far larger than a real bone.
About the size of a person's upper body.

With no standard of scale, there is no telling how large.
The bone can look like a mountain.

The outline is sharp.

There is nowhere faint.
The line where bone meets sky stands like a knife.

The opposite of the surface in the last chapter.

Tamayo's surface was rough.
This surface is smooth.

The marks of the brush are barely visible.
Color is set down evenly as planes.

Come close and the surface does not change.
What was seen from far and what is seen from near are the same.

It is a surface with nothing hidden.

Two

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Wisconsin, in the United States.

On a farm.

She learned painting in Chicago and New York.
For a time she taught at schools.

There was a period when she taught in Texas.

It was plains.
Land that hid nothing.

That was when she first knew wide country.

She returned to New York and made a name.

She painted flowers large.

She filled the surface with a small flower.
Because she thought people passed flowers by.

Made large, they are seen.

She painted the buildings of the city as well.

She was a successful painter.

There is something to note here.

She learned the method of painting large in the city.
Before she went to the desert.

And in the desert that method fitted the land.

Erasing the background and setting one thing large.
That was exactly how that land is seen.

The method came first, and the land made it right.

Fūdo begets form, and it also sets a form that already exists into its proper place.

In 1929 she went to New Mexico for the first time.
She was forty-one.

And she went every summer after that.

In 1940 she took a house at a ranch in the desert.
Some years later she took another nearby.

In 1949 she moved for good.
She was sixty-two.

A late move.

She already had a name and already had a manner.
It was an age with no reason to change.

And she changed.

Out the window there was a mountain.
A mountain with a flat crown.

She painted that mountain for a long time.

She painted it many times and in many seasons.

She gathered bones in the desert.

Cow skulls, pelvises, vertebrae.
She collected them and kept them at the house.

People read them as symbols of death.
Desert and bone and skull.

She did not think so.

She saw bone as what remains.
What still has form after the flesh is gone.

Flesh rots and bone remains.

That remaining was her interest.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Dryness begets outline.

When there is water in the air, distant things grow faint.
Boundaries loosen and color thins.

Painting uses this.
The far faint, the near strong.

Then depth appears on a plane.

In the desert it does not work that way.

When the air is clear, a distant mountain is also sharp.
A rock miles off keeps its outline.

Then distance cannot be made with faintness.

Here we arrive at the same place as the last chapter.

Tamayo's surface had no depth.
O'Keeffe's surface has no depth.

Because both lands are dry.

But what comes next differs.

Tamayo got weight out of the plane.
He stacked color and made it a wall.

O'Keeffe got outline out of the plane.
She divided color into planes and raised the boundaries.

Two answers came out of the same condition.

Four things follow.

First, color divides into planes.

When the outline is clear, color takes territory.

This side is white and that side is blue.
The place where they mix is narrow.

Colors do not seep into one another.

In a humid place color seeps.
In a dry place color collides.

Second, there is less reason to paint shadow.

Soft shadow is made by air.
When light strikes moisture and scatters, the edge of a shadow loosens.

In clear air the edge of a shadow stands like a knife.

A shadow with a sharp edge is close to a form.
Then, instead of painting a shadow, one paints one more form.

That there is little soft shading on her surface is not a matter of skill.
It is because what she saw was so.

Third, the standard of scale disappears.

With no background there is nothing to compare against.

Palm-sized or house-sized, there is no telling.

The desert is actually like that.

There is nothing to serve as a standard.
No tree, no house, no person.

Whether a far rock is large or a near stone is small becomes confused.

Dry land erases the standard of scale.

So she could paint a bone as large as a mountain.
The land permitted it first.

Fourth, the sky becomes an object.

The sky of a humid place is air.
Far, thin, without boundary.

The sky of a dry place is a plane.
The color is even and the edge is definite.

The blue that has come into the hole in the bone does not look like air.
It looks like blue paper pasted on.

The sky has become a form, not a background.

Then sky and bone are set down with equal standing.
Which is in front and which behind is not decided.

Dry land erases above and below.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

First look at what is alike.

Both went late to that land.

O'Keeffe first went at forty-one and moved at sixty-two.
Byun Shi-Ji went at forty-nine.

Both were already painters.
It was not an age for learning.

And in that land the form changed.

Going late has a different force.

One who goes young learns the land.
One who goes late is startled by it.

Being startled changes form.

There is one more likeness.

Both painted what is dry.

O'Keeffe painted bone.
Byun Shi-Ji painted dry grass.

But the kind of dryness differs.

The dryness of bone is dryness with the flesh gone.
It is a dryness that remains.

The dryness of grass is dryness with the season past.
It is a dryness that scatters.

Bone lasts a hundred years.
Dry grass does not get through one winter.

So there is something solid on O'Keeffe's surface, and something about to vanish on Byun Shi-Ji's.

Now look at the difference.

The largest difference is the air.

Both lands are dry.
But the clarity of the air is reversed.

The desert is dry and clear.
With no wind the dust settles.

Jeju is not dry.
The sea is beside it, so it is humid.
And the wind is strong, so it dries.

Wet air and drying wind are there together.

Wind lifts dust and moisture.
Then the air grows dim.

The same dryness, and one is clear and one is dim.

So the brightness of the void differs.

O'Keeffe's empty surface is bright.
The blue sky is simply there.

Byun Shi-Ji's empty surface is low.
The color has settled.

The void of a dry place is bright, and the void of a windy place is dim.

The outline differs too.

O'Keeffe's outline is smooth.
It looks like a line drawn in one pass.

Byun Shi-Ji's line trembles.
It goes straight and then wavers.

That is how an outline in clear air and an outline in wind differ.

There is one more large difference.

O'Keeffe almost never painted people.

Bone and mountain and flower and sky.
No people.

Byun Shi-Ji almost always painted people.

One old man is standing.

On dry ground with no people, bone becomes the subject.
With people, the old man becomes the subject.

And yet the two are alike.

Bone is a body that remains.
An old man is a person who remains.

Both are what remains.

One painted what remains after the person is gone. The other painted the person still remaining.

What they painted for a long time also differs.

O'Keeffe painted the mountain for a long time.
That mountain out the window, many times over.

Byun Shi-Ji painted the horizon for a long time.

A mountain is a thing that exists.
One can go and touch it.

A horizon is a thing that does not exist.
Go near and it disappears.

One who looked long at an object and one who looked long at a boundary.

That difference stayed on the surface.

Five

Through the hole in the bone the sky is seen.

The hole is the place that is not bone.
An absent place.

Through that absent place something is seen.

On the island's surface, wind is seen through the void.

The wind is not painted.
It is seen in the place that was not painted.

Both made one see through what is absent.

The sky is still blue.
The hole is still empty.