Remembering Georgia

1996 was my first time driving through New Mexico, it was warm and desert like, low mountains and vast spaces. I had spent some time in Santa Fe and had taken the high road up to Taos, great picturesque valleys and grand vistas. The desert had been in bloom and it was truly spectacular, driving for hours. as if in a trippy, dream-like state.
The American artist Georgia O’Keeffe had spent a lot of years in Santa Fe and had painted her desert landscapes and iconic great flowers and skulls, there. Her work was to be found referenced everywhere I went, she is known as the mother of American Modernism and I loved her work, bold and beautiful, great cloths of gorgeous colour and form.
Years previously, I had found a large cattle skull on a trip to Mexico and loved Its bleached bone and twisting horns, its deep empty eye sockets, I thought I would do some paintings with it but instead, it just hung for years, from a nail in the studio in San Diego and then on a different one in the studio in Bray and then an entirely new one in Carlow. Then - just like that - thirty years had passed and now Jade was looking at the dusty old skull on a rusty old nail in my dusty old studio. She really liked Georgia’s work, and had wanted to use some of the elements in her own work, large flowers, skulls, stripped back backgrounds, floating elements. When she had all the elements together it made sense to me, her referencing Georgia, the elements living again. I thought of the old Kodachrome colours, saturated with greys,
I had been thinking of the 1930s and I had been thinking of New Mexico,
But mostly, I had been thinking of Georgia O’ Keeffe.
“The mother of modernism”.