‘Channeling my inner Georgia O’Keeffe’ by St. Louis Dispatche’s Laurie Skrivan

One can’t write about vaginas, vajayjas and vulvas, as I did yesterday, and not think of Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist devoted to escavating our sensual psyches. O’Keeffe begs us not to turn away from the unrivaled sensual beauty of orchids, mountains and sacred mounds, entrances to meaning in life’s inner sanctums.

O’Keeffe’s words, paintings and life philosophy belong very much at Anne of Carversville because this originally ‘fierce’, bold woman lived and painted through her senses.

The bold art of this revolutionary artist who dared to paint through her senses is on exhibition in Washington D.C.at The Phillips Collection until May 9, 2010.

The Phillips exhibition overview reminds us that Georgia O’Keeffe was a radical thinker, deciding that her art would record her feelings and visceral observations and not the appearance of things.

The sensuality of nature was her Hermes, orchids her divine source of inspiration.

O’Keeffe believed in rules, cutting away excess in pursuit of divine essence. Not meaning to affront moon goddesses, Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t one of them.

By magnifying and tightly cropping her images, a framing device used by photographers, she found the means to express simultaneously the vastness of nature, the immensity of her own response to it, and a powerful sense of being one with it.

O’Keeffe’s work was considered shocking; her closeups of flowers immoral and scandalous, in a Midwestern sort of way. It’s easy for us to laugh and point a wagging figure at O’Keeffe’s world, but Americans haven’t evolved much since her lucid portrayal of vulva-like imagery in flowers made proper women squeam in discomfort — only to discover an erotic sensation on their pure bottoms.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, WashingtonExploring this question reminds me of the day in 2007 that I looked up the definition of ‘sensuality’ in the dictionary and understood that I am damned for certain.  Beauty is produced not by God, but by the Devil, according to the patriarchy in charge of dictionaries, encyclopedias and human language.