The Artist's Palette: Georgia O'Keeffe, A Book Review Part 3
Georgia O'Keeffe: How War made her color palette
I am not sure when it was that I first saw a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, but I know that I was young and that I loved it. She has always been one of my most favorite artists.
Known as a Precisionist, O'Keeffe's attention to detail, crips lines, and perspective is what makes her noted among great artists in history. Although she is known primarily for her flower and skull oil paintings, what is lesser known is that O'Keeffe's subject matter is as varied as the materials that she used and that those materials were influenced by war.
Unlike her oil paintings, O'Keeffe's water colors are not only lyrical and impulsive, but also not widely known. And so you can image my excitement when I opened to O'Keeffe's page in The Artist's Palette and saw two of her watercolors:
However, that is where my excitement ended as part of O'Keeffe's painting habits were attributed to her watercolor paintings when it should have been said about her oil paints. Dates were also incorrect. In fact, if you knew nothing of O'Keeffe but what the book told you, you would not have known that she is historically known for her oil paintings and not her watercolors. The Artist's Palette says the following while referring to her watercolors:
...The paintbox was sourced from the British art supplier Winsor & Newton, which became one of O'Keeffe's favorite brands. To create her luminous blues, she opted for cerulean, cobalt and real and artificial ultramarine, but she also used Winsor & Newton's flake white, viridian green, cadmium yellow and red, alizarin crimson, and iron reds. She made detailed notes of their permanence, drying times and other qualities on colour cards, which she used to plan compositions.
Let's break this down into two points. Point 1: Yes, Winsor & Newton was primarily the only the brand O'Keeffe used throughout her life, but why she did so is not only interesting but also important historically. During the beginning of her career the United States did not have high-end oil paint manufacturers, and WWI and WWII made getting paints from France, Belgium, or the Netherlands impossible for decades, so O'Keeffe's brand of choice became the British brand Winsor & Newton for her watercolors and her oils, as it was the most consistent brand that she had available to her. O'Keeffe not only used the colors that she did because those were the colors that Winsor & Newton manufactured, but also continued to use Winsor & Newton when other brands became available because of the time and effort she had put into understanding her colors. This leads me to point 2.
Point 2: Yes, O'Keeffe did make detailed color cards for herself, about 330 of them, but these were for her oil paints and not for her watercolors.
Dale Kronkright, Georgia O'Keeffe museum’s head of conservation, said this about how meticulous O'Keeffe was with her oil paints:
Knowing exactly how her materials were going to behave freed her in terms of subject matter and composition...She also relied on a core group of colours for most of her career, because she wanted to know exactly how they would behave. She wanted constant characteristics, such as tint, power, drying rates and even the consistency with which it comes out of the tube.
The book continues on and misrepresents when O'Keeffe started to oil paint. The Artist's Palette says: "Later that year (1918) she produced her first paintings in oil."
No, that year she produced what is now considered one of her first major works, Music, Pink, and Blue No. 1 and 2, 1918. O'Keeffe had been painting in oil for years.
Further, while the book focuses so heavily on her watercolors it misses the opportunity to explain why her watercolors were so important to her oil paintings.
Traditionally when painting in watercolor, the whiteness of the paper is used as the white of the painting. This means that you start with your lightest colors and you build towards your darkest.
Traditionally oil painting is the opposite to watercolors. The whiteness of the canvas is completely covered and you paint from dark to light, adding back in the white of the canvas.
In her oil paintings, O'Keeffe bucks at tradition and paints mostly from light to dark as if she is using watercolor. When you see an O'Keeffe painting in person, you can see the whiteness of the canvas. Dale Kronkright said,“She painted in a single thin layer, exposing the texture of her canvas and inviting the viewer to engage with the delicate qualities of her oils.”
Below is a list of her oil paints:
Georgia O'Keeffe's Most Common Color Palette
Blues
Cerulean
Cobalt
Ultra Marine Blue
Greens
Viridian
Terre Verte aka. Green Earth
Yellows
Cadmium Yellow
Lemons Yellow
Reds
Carmine
Manganese Violet
Cadmium Red
Browns
Yellow Ochre
Venetian red
Burnt Sienna
Whites
Flake White
Modern Equivalents
Blues
Cerulean
Cobalt
Toxic, consider using Phthalo blue instead.
Ultra Marine
Prussian Blue
Greens
Viridian
Terre Verte aka. Green Earth
Yellows
Cadmium Yellow
Toxic, consider Hansa Yellow Med.
Lemon Yellow
Reds
Cadmium Red
Toxic, consider Napthol Red
Quinacridone Red
Alizarin Permanent
Quinacridone Violet
Browns
Yellow Ochre
Transparent Red Earth
Burnt Sienna
Whites
Titanium Zinc White
On a personal note about O'Keeffe, not only did she invite us to engage with the delicacy of her oil washes, but also nature itself. This examination of nature has been sexually interpreted both during her life and after; no matter how much O'Keeffe clarified this point, it still follows her. She said the following in a passage originally published in the exhibition catalog An American Place in 1939, about her flowers:
A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don’t.
In 1974 for an article with the New York Times, O'Keeffe was quoted saying,"Eroticism!...That's something people themselves put into the paintings. They've found things that never entered my mind."
So yes, watercolors were incredibly important to O'Keeffe, but the book fails to explain why and how her watercolors influenced her works of art.
In conclusion, is The Artist's Palette: The Palettes Behind the Paintings of 50 Great Artists worth the money? If you want a pretty book to look at, 100%. If you actually wanna read it? Probably not.
Although, I have enjoyed reading it and picking it part, so maybe it is?
Links to O'Keeffe's colors palette are: TheMarginalian, Elephant Art, Museum, Color Composition
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