By Charlotte Strick
There’s a certain weather-beaten tree stump at Ghost Ranch—the U-shaped, adobelike home once occupied by the famed American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe—where Josephine Halvorson, the first artist-in-residence at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, often took breaks from her own work. It offered her a clear view of Cerro Pedernal, the narrow New Mexican mesa that appears in many of O’Keeffe’s desert paintings, and where the artist’s ashes are scattered. From here Halvorson could observe weather patterns forming around the mesa’s caprock, circling the top and then sweeping theatrically down its cliff face, racing across the plain toward her.
Halvorson makes paintings
on-site, in proximity to the objects she hopes to commemorate, and the museum
offered her access to a rich archive of letters, clothing, books, as well as
O’Keeffe’s two homes, Ghost Ranch and nearby Abiquiú. Halvorson spent two
months there: one in the summer of 2019 and another a year later, during the
pandemic.
“It was through the sense
of quiet and closeness that I connected with her things,” Halvorson recalls.
“The museum registrar would open a cabinet or put the group of keys out on the
table for me. No one who visited me was permitted to come into the house, so it
was really just me there alone, working every day from dawn till dusk.” In
Abiquiú, Halvorson made intimate acrylic gouache paintings of the tree stump, a
curious grouping of tagged keys, and the interior of a kitchen cupboard stacked
with O’Keeffe’s dishes. Wishing to manifest a sense of place, she used the same
close crops to capture a National Forest sign complete with target practice
holes, as well as an abandoned pile of kindling that she conceived as a
memorial to her father, whose loss she was grieving—he had passed from
coronavirus that year. Her still lifes are all framed by wide, chalky-colored
“surrounds” that draw on the dusty hues of the area. Halvorson regards these as
visual “buffer zones” between the object in situ and the white gallery wall.
Each has a surface made rough by small rocks, which Halvorson collected on the
property and then ground up to be preserved in paint as a geological account of
the place and time. “The rocks represent a much deeper past than what I’m able
to paint in real time,” she explains. The result is a series of paintings,
eleven in all, that read like tightly framed long-exposure snapshots. The
greatest challenge, Halvorson said, was “to make art that isn’t about O’Keeffe,
but is instead in relation to her.”
