Georgia O'Keeffe Museum: Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2017

One of the highlights of visiting O'Keeffe Country is to see her artwork up close and personal. That means a trip from Abiquiu, where we were staying in an adobe, to Santa Fe.

The museum is in the heart of the downtown area of Santa Fe. Parking is always a problem in a downtown area but we finally found a meter with a 3-hour limit. Since I knew the museum was small, that sounded like enough time.

I found it fitting that the museum was an adobe structure as that is the same structure of both her New Mexico homes in the Abiquiu village and on the Ghost Ranch. Apparently she moved with Juan Hamilton and his family to Santa Fe when she was ill and near the end of her life and needed to be near health care facilities. I found nothing that indicates where the Santa Fe home is located. 

Tim decided to join a tour given by a docent but I roamed around on my own. We weren't allowed to take photos inside so I have downloaded some of the art that we saw. There were about 100 pieces of art on display but the museum owns more.

The pieces are rotated in and out so if visitors come back another year, they are likely to see something different.

Black hollyhock blue larkspur is one of my very favorite of Georgia's flowers. It is on display this year.

“Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur,” 1930. Georgia O’Keeffe. Oil on canvas. 30 1/8 x 40 (76.5 x 101.6). Extended loan, private collection. c Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

I used to have a print of it hanging in my kitchen when we lived on the farm in Fairland.

Another favorite is the Jimson Weed. She painted a series of these in the 1930s. The Indianapolis Museum of art has one, which we plan to go see soon.

"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, 

you could not ignore its beauty." Georgia O'Keeffe

This is one of the Cottonwood tree series. She painted cottonwoods on the ranch and on her Abiquiu village property.

Georgia loved the bleached bones she found on the desert. She said they did NOT signify death to her but beauty. One of my favorites is the skull with the calico flower.

"The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is 

keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty 

and untouchable... and knows no kindness with 

all its beauty." Georgia O'Keeffe

She liked to hold a pelvic bone up to the sky and paint what she saw. 

And always, her beloved Pedernal.

"It's my private mountain. It belongs to me.

God told me if I painted it enough, 

I could have it." Georgia O'Keeffe

The Georgia O'Keeffe Cafe is next door to the museum but we did not go there. 

Instead, we went two doors down to Sweet Lily's for a snack and coffee and tea to warm us up for our 5-minute walk back to the car.

Ghost Ranch: north of Abiquiu, New Mexico, April 2017

Ghost Ranch became a destination in our O'Keeffe Country trip because Georgia has a home there; it became her spring and summer retreat for painting.

Ghost Ranch was part of the Piedra Lumbre, Spanish for Shining Rock, a 1766 land grant to Pedro Martin Serrano from Charles III of Spain. The Rito del Yeso runs through the canyons and gorge providing a source of water.

The ranch became notorious for some time thanks to the Archuleta brothers, who were cattle rustlers and murderers. Due to the box canyon that provided "invisiblity," the brothers were able to hide the stolen cattle from anyone who tried to reclaim a herd.  The name comes from the stories of people hearing the cries of ghosts of all the victims of the Archuleta brothers. In the end, one brother shot the other and terrorized his late brother's wife and child, who escaped one night on a burro.

When the wife explained what happened, a group of ranchers went to the ranch, even though they, too, feared the ghosts, and hanged the remaining brother and his gang from a cottonwood tree by one of the casitas on the ranch.

The history of the ranch is chronicled in a wonderful book called Ghost Ranch by Lesley Poling-Kempes. I found this in the adobe late in our stay so I was only able to start reading it.

Ghost Ranch, with its 21,000 acres including lots of red rock scenery, has been used in filming a number of movies including one of my favorites, City Slickers with Billy Crystal. The cabin and corral remains on the site, which is located near the entrance of the ranch.

Great spot for a selfie. Notice Pedernal in the far background.

Besides City Slickers (1991), these films were also shot on Ghost Ranch: Silverado (1985), The Last Outlaw (1993 TV movie), Wyatt Earp (1994), Wild Wild West (1999), All the Pretty Horses (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Georgia O'Keeffe (2009 TV movie), Year One (2009), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), Lone Ranger (2013), Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

Long after the Archuleto brothers were gone, the ranch became a dude ranch for wealthy Easterners mostly. One visitor in the 1930s was Arthur Newton Pack, a writer and editor of Nature Magazine. Because of a sickly daughter, Pack brought his family to the ranch with its dry climate. The owner, Carol Stanley, was having a hard time breaking even so she sold the ranch to Pack. 

He built an adobe home on the ranch for his family, naming it Rancho de los Burros; a wild herd of burros had been moved to the ranch, and his children rode them. 

This is the pueblo Rancho de los Burros on a part of the ranch not accessible to visitors like us. Notice Georgia's favorite object to paint, Pedernal, in the background.

When an aged Pack couldn't sell the ranch to someone who would preserve it in the way he envisioned, he donated it in 1955 to The Presbyterian Church, which uses the ranch as an educational and retreat center. More than 300 classes are offered on the ranch.

While it was still a guest ranch under Pack, Georgia O'Keeffe began to visit and stayed in this casita, starting in 1936:

Tim at Georgia's first "home" on the ranch.

Georgia fell in love with the land and had been splitting her time between New York, where she lived with her philandering husband Arthur Stieglitz, a famous photographer, and New Mexico. She loved having "alone time," which Ghost Ranch provided. She painted this picture of Ghost Ranch.

One thing Pack shared with Georgia was a philandering spouse. When his wife left him for an archeologist who had been studying on the ranch, he moved his family to the Ghost Ranch headquarters, which visitors can walk through.

Ghost Ranch headquarters.

In 1940, Georgia eagerly jumped at the chance to buy Rancho de los Burros from Pack along with 7 acres. This home remains with the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which has not yet made it available for the public to tour although visitors can see a bit of it from one of the available tours of the ranch.

Another view of Rancho de los Burros, Georgia's Ghost Ranch home.

This is Georgia climbing the ladder of Rancho de los Burros, her Ghost Ranch home. She would use this home in spring and summer to get away from the gardening and other chores in Abiquiu so she could focus on painting. From this place, she could easily see Pedernal, which she continued to paint again and again.

This painting is called The House I Live In, 1937, oil on canvas, 14 x 30, now in a private collection in New Haven Connecticut.

This one is called Pedernal - from Ranch #1, 1956, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 40.5 inches, in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. When she came to New Mexico, she began to collect the bones she found in the desert. This looks like one of her pelvic bone pieces.

At some point, Georgia created the logo for Ghost Ranch:

There is another famous landform on the ranch called Chimney Rock. This is how we saw it through our camera lens:

This is how Georgia saw it with her paint brush: The Cliff Chimneys, which is owned by the Milwaukee Art Museum.

This is me with the Chimney Rock way in the background. It was sunny that day but fairly cold. We didn't stay outside too long.

Georgia wasn't the only one to own a private home on Ghost Ranch. This was the home of Robert Wood Johnson of Johnson & Johnson, the company currently being sued over its baby powder that allegedly causes cancer in women.

Today, the home houses Ghost Ranch's library, open 24 hours a day for guests and area residents, with apartments above the main floor library. We met the librarian Maureen Fitzgibbon and talked with her for some time. She gave us a great tip about eating at Angelina's in Espanolo...great sopapillas. Maureen is a retired nurse who first visited Ghost Ranch, became a volunteer, and then became the librarian.

Maureen says she keeps the card catalog around for "nostalgia." The books are cataloged using Follett Destiny -- of course, I asked! While the nonfiction is classified by Library of Congress, she recently reorganized the fiction alphabetically by author. She has no e-books and doesn't recall anyone ever asking about them. She does find that many of the ranch staff like audiobooks because they commute to the ranch from all around including Santa Fe.

Visit the library online at https://www.ghostranch.org/explore/library/

A screenshot from a search of Ghost Ranch's library catalog for books about Ghost Ranch.

There are some tours of the ranch available but while we were interested in the horseback tour, it was rainy, cool, and windy so we passed ... this time. For some of the tours that are available at Ghost Ranch, check out https://www.ghostranch.org/visit/tours-trail-rides/okeeffe-tours/

I want to go back and do them all as well as attend a retreat.

For other books about Ghost Ranch, try these: 

Georgia O'Keeffe and her houses : Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Agapita Judy Lopez.

Georgia O'Keeffe at ghost ranch : a photo-essay by John Loengard.

Ghost Ranch and the faraway nearby photographs by Craig Varjabedian ; essays by Marin Sardy ... [et al.] ; introduction by Jay Packer ; afterword by Georgia O'Keeffe.

I know I'm going to try to find them.

A vacation in New Mexico: a beautiful adobe, Casa Bonita, near Abiquiu, New Mexic

We had seen pictures of Casa Bonita on the VRBO website but they couldn't compare to the real deal: an adobe home built in 2008, at least according to the date someone had etched in the cement near the entry.

 The famous Cerro Pedernal looks blue in the background. This was one of Georgia O'Keeffe's favorite objects to paint. She once said that God told her he'd give her the mountain if she painted it often enough.

One of the most famous paintings she did is Red Hills with the Pedernal, 1936. Pastel on paaper mounted to wood pulp board. 21.5 x27.25 inches. Brooklyn Museum.

The adobe was in the middle of nowhere: 

The views from the adobe were breathtaking. I can't even begin to capture them with a camera but I tried.

 

This is one of my favorites because it is directly across from the Ghost Ranch, which will be the subject of another blog another day. And those shots were our front yard.

The Pedernal was in our back yard:

Talk about a great location to spend a week.

Even the reflections on the the doors to the front portales were spectacular.

We had a bird friend who spent every day crashing into the glass. Tim named him Bumper.

 We told him to stop, we waved our hands, but he was just determined to come in the door.

It was cold while we were there, but we enjoyed it.

Casa Bonita was very nice inside too. The bedroom had a view of the Pedernal.

 

It even snowed two days of our vacation. It didn't last but the clouds were so low that visibility was very poor. A good day to just stay in the adobe.

Cloudless nights gave us beautiful sunsets.

This sunset photo almost looks like a Georgia O'Keeffe abstraction.

If you'd like to learn more about Casa Bonita, you can find it at vrbo: https://www.vrbo.com/462614

Georgia's Place: Abiquiu, New Mexico, April 2017

A vacation in New Mexico: Georgia O'Keeffe's studio and home in Abiquiu

It all started with a desire to go West again. We hadn't been since 2000. As we zeroed in, we decided to explore O'Keeffe Country. Using VRBO, we found a wonderful adobe to rent for a week. It was 25 miles from Abiquiu, New Mexico, the focal point of our exploration as Georgia O'Keeffe had her studio and home in the little village.

This is the courtyard of her home and studio in Abiquiu.

There is a door in this courtyard that Georgia painted again and again. Tim is standing in front of it.

This is my favorite version.

This one is nice as well. 

She saw it many different ways:

Her property is located on almost 4 acres. The drawing above is a layout of her home and studio in the upper right with the garden and trees filling up the rest of the plan. She wanted to grow enough fruits and vegetables to sustain herself through the winter. Today, the staff uses the produce and some of it is donated to food banks. Today the garden is supervised by the grandson of her original gardener. Another grandson was our tour bus driver.

This is the well. When all the village was connected to a water supply, thanks to Georgia, she covered her well so her Chows wouldn't fall in and then she topped the well cover with two pieces of sculpture.

This is the inside of the "formal entry" into the courtyard. This is where visitors would enter. 

Georgia would use the garage entry.

 Wendy at the entrance to the area leading to the garage.

This is the entry one would walk into from that door, Barbara, our knowledgeable guide was showing a famous photo of Georgia sitting in this very place.

The is the photo Barbara was showing us.

The tour restricted us from taking photos inside the house, but this is a famous photo of Georgia at the window that overlooks the highway. We got to stand in this very place. She watched the highway and ended up painting the view.

Barbara, our tour guide, showed us how one of those "abstractions" turned out.

From her home high in the village, she could see all the incoming cars. If you look closely at the top of the photo below, you can see the adobe perched there.

This is part of the garden area. You can watch the garden being watered starting every Monday morning at 9 a.m. via a webcam monitored by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. The link is https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/about-georgia-okeeffe/abiquiu-camera/

Another view of the garden. It is flooded once a week on Monday and that is all that is needed for the plants to grow. 

A view of the studio from the outside.

Another view of the outside. Georgia also had a bomb shelter installed on the property during the "Cold War." In the summer, a special tour is given of the property that shows the interior of the shelter. Four beds and lots of food. She was prepared.

Georgia loved cottonwood trees and has many on her property. 

She enjoyed painting these trees again and again.

This is just one version: Georgia O'Keeffe, Winter Cottonwoods East V, 1954, Oil on canvas,

Another item in her courtyard that she enjoyed painting was the adobe with the ladder. 

She painted the ladder in many ways.

Ladder against studio wall in snow, undated.

 Ladder to the moon, 1958.

Similar to the way writers write what they know, Georgia O'Keeffe painted what she saw.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio Tours starts from the Abiquiu Inn in Abiquiu, New Mexico. For more information, go to https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/store/products/abiquiu/abiquiu-home-studio-tour/

We enjoyed the 90-minue tour very much. Maybe you will also.