“At Potsdam, there is the wherewithal to make us happy.”

Fredrick the Great from the memoirs of his reader, Henri de Catt – 1758-1760

The enchanting landscape of lakes and forests surrounding Potsdam had captured the imagination of the Prussian Empire’s royal family, dating back to the 16th century. These hunting grounds inspired Fredrick the Great to create his own retreat there – Sans-Souci. Drawn out of his love of the place and a longing to the escape from the life of the court, the name itself reflects the ideal dreamscape he had in mind – Sans-Souci – “without care” – creating a place that reflects the absence of protocol, where life is dedicated to the Arts, Nature and the delight of conversations. A place where this feeling can still be captured to this day.

Grand, yet intimate in scale and plan – the single story Rococo villa was designed and built by Georg W. Von Knoblesdorff. The building’s central rotunda was ornamented by sculptural hermes and its framing linear wings evokes a sense of the grandeur of the period, as they overlook the ripple of vine terraces which descend the hill below, where a vineyard and orchard covers six stepped stone curving terraced retaining walls.

Despite the rich embellishment of the villa itself, the isolated siting and integration into the landscape has much more the feeling of a hermitage than a royal palace. Extending out from either side of the villa, a trellis-work framed by pavilions make the width of the garden and is framed on either side by avenues of five rows of chestnut and walnut trees enclosing the central parterre below, with its cutwork sections – each with an extravagant selection of flowers, arranged around a quatrefoil pool and fountain. The gravel’s crunch below your feet as you walk out into the parks carries you into an extended landscape through narrow, framing axes cutting across the surrounding forest to vistas beyond.

Despite his wishes, the grounds and park of Sans Souci would have a life beyond Fredrick II – he had intended it to be for his life alone and saw it as a living building destined to become a romantic ruin after he was gone. His heir the Crown Prince Frederick William would add his own mark to the park and in time exceed the vision of his father. On lands that at the time were adjacent to Sans Souci, his father would make a Christmas gift of them for his son and his wife to create a place of their own. Working on the foundations of an already existing farm house, Frederick would engage Karl Schinkel with the help of his student Ludwig Persius, to design a small Neo-Classical palace in the image of a roman villa.

Like his father before him, he was integrally involved in the planning process and worked with both Schinkel and Persius to realize this idealized Roman form complete with its inspired interiors, garden spaces and out buildings. In what at first seems a very simple siting of the villa, the experience becomes as vivid and playful in the garden as it is the interior spaces, which all align to follow the trajectory of the sun, and enhances the play of light during different seasons. Walking up through a vine covered, trellised pergola, the land and your perspective are constantly designed to create a distinctive setting within the larger park. Intimate courts with delicately scaled fountains and runnels connect the villa’s portico to an exedra terrace under a dramatic tented vine that carries over to a lower garden court.

Making a formal connection to, but also leaving behind the Sans Souci site, landscape architects Hermann Sello and Peter Joseph Lenne would transform this flat and marshy landscape into an English styled interpretation of the villa. Like Schinkel’s elegant Roman Bath House whose loggias and courts create its own exceptional gardenscape with details and interiors that reflect a contemporary expression of the Roman myth within our imagination.

The Chinese Tea House by Johann Buring, whose blending of Rococo ornament with Chinoiserie creates and exotic pavilion to adorn the flower and vegetable garden.

Frederick IV would also add the great Orangeries Palace, built in the style of the Italian Renaissance and influenced by the Uffizi and Villa Medici in Florence. The grandeur and inventiveness of the architecture here is almost unmatched in the park. Again using the terracing of a hillside, this exceeds its function creating some of the most engaging spaces in the park. Lenne would shape his gardens for this space from these and other inspirations – the Paradise garden below with its grottos and more Italianate influences, the Norse garden with its great grotto like stone entry portal and its tall pines lining garden paths lies to the east and the Sicilian Garden with its abundant palms, laurels and myrtles, framed by the dappled light of arcades and the sounds of gently lapping fountains line sun drenched to the south.

Categories: About Michael

A Holiday Treat

Mac White

Posted on December 20, 2019

This time of year brings to mind traveling to see family to share the holidays and the festive meals that come with the celebrations. One of my favorite treats to make during this season came out of a trip to Kentucky a few years back, and it has fast become a tradition in our holiday baking- Bourbon Balls.

The oldest rick house at Maker’s Mark

Driving through the rolling hills of Marion County, this picturesque landscape of peaceful farms contained by their stacked stone walls, interrupted by wooded thickets and the tracery of clear, cold running streams. Along these roads lie the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, where these historic, family run distilleries begin to dot the landscape, their presence first hinted at by the distinctive, tall rick houses that store the barrels.

The original still house along its spring-fed creek

While this recipe is an amalgam of some new- from the distilleries, and some old – from my grandmother, it has become a family favorite.

Ingredients:

makes approximately four dozen

One box of vanilla wafers, crushed to a fine grain crumbs

Two cups of pecan halves

1/2 cup of heavy cream, plus two tablespoons

Four tablespoons of Karo syrup

Two tablespoons of honey

Nine to twelve ounces of shaved chocolate, half bittersweet, half dark chocolate

One teaspoon of vanilla

1/4 cup of sugar

Four tablespoons of your favorite bourbon, or add more to taste!!

______________________________________________

Directions:

Take the pecan halves and spread half of them on a baking tray and toast for ten minutes or until fragrant. Pulling them from the oven and getting that first whiff of the roasted pecans is the delicious reward for this first step.

Next, finely chop the roasted pecans, then take half and mix with the vanilla wafer crumbs. Set aside.

Now take a saucepan, mix the cream, syrup and honey, bringing to a boil. Pour this mix over the shaved chocolate in a separate bowl. Allow to sit briefly, and then stir until it is a deep, rich chocolate. Add this mixture to the cookie crumbs and pecans, along with the bourbon and mix throughly. Once complete, chill for at least one hour in refrigerator.

While this is chilling, mix the remaining portion of the pecans, the sugar and the vanilla in a bowl and set aside.

Roll teaspoon size scoops of the chocolate dough into small balls and then roll them through the pecan-sugar mix to cover each ball.

Final step – share with family and friends and enjoy!

Happy Holidays!

Categories: Recipes

Tagged: Bourbon, Holiday Treat, New Year, recipe

Preserving Uriarte

Angela Gallegos

Posted on December 6, 2019

Today, bits of these unique works of art, which speak to the Spanish and Mexican heritage of Texas, can be found across San Antonio including the McNay’s peacock murals in the courtyard garden, and the mysterious Miraflores Garden just outside of Brackenridge park.

The McNay Art Museum (also known as the Atkinson Residence) is the former home of Marion Koogler McNay, which was designed by famed San Antonio architect Atlee B Ayres. As a child, Ayres lived in a home across from the Alamo and often admired its “golden hue”. As an adult, he worked in Mexico and later traveled to California often, where he fell in love with the Spanish American colloquial architecture of California. He Combined these influences when he was commissioned by Mrs. Atkinson (McNay) to design her home. McNay, an avid art enthusiast who also spent time visiting Mexico, commissioned a tile art mural by the Uriarte workshop based on her sketches. These murals, as well as other genuine talavera art displays, prominently adorn the walls at the modern day McNay art museum.

The Miraflores entry gate is no longer at its original location but is being preserved at the San Antonio Museum of Art as a work of art on display.

Categories: About Michael

The Luminist

Michael Imber

Posted on November 22, 2019

John Frederick Kensett, Sunset Sky, 1872

As I stepped out of the car onto the deck of a near empty ferry making way across Penobscot Bay, the winter air was biting, yet clear and luminous. I looked back towards Camden where the mountains met the sea and I basked in the glow of a setting sun. Some find it odd that I would travel to our island home during the harshest season Down East Maine has to offer, but there is something about New England in the winter as the sun rides low in the sky, shadows are soft and long, and everything is bathed is a soft cool light. It is the magic that can slow time.

Fitz Hugh Lane, Camden Mountains and Harbor from the North Point of Negro Island, 1855

Artists have long attempted to capture the ether of that moment, when the sun’s light seems to fill every ion of the atmosphere. In the mid to late 19^th century, a group labeled Luminists by John Baur of the Whitney Museum in the 1950’s, sought to capture more than the physical American landscape, but “the favor God cast upon it”; the goodness of a transcendental light that bathed this American landscape.

Gifford, Sunset Over New York Bay, 1873

Robert Rosenblum, Professor of Fine Arts at NYU noted, “The unpopulated landscapes of Martin Johnson Heade or Fitz Hugh Lane may evoke peculiarly American myths and experiences of an awesomely vast, primeval terrain in which something akin to God casts immaterial rays upon land of blessed purity and innocence.”

John Frederick Kensett, Sunset On The Sea, 1872

These early Luminists, with their smooth, brush-less paintings paved the way for the Hudson River School. Known for their dramatic depictions of the American Wilderness, they were particularly interested in the interplay between clouds and light; where and how light moves. These artists would often create a quick sketch in the field, then retreat to their studio where they would meticulously render light, often depicting every spectrum of light within a single wave.

1870,_Kensett,_John_Frederick,_Lake_George

John Frederick, Lake George, 1870

These paintings were the first contemplation of the American Domain philosophically as man spread out across the American continent. This was a place where human beings and nature coexisted; where poetic and artistic inspiration found no impediments; where man could abandon rationalism for emotion and feeling.

Frederick Church, Niagara Falls, 1857

Frederick Church, Twilight in the Wilderness

Frederick Church’s landscapes “rise like great cathedrals into the realms of light where the deity seems to reside“; a primordial image of American wholeness.

Thomas Cole, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, 1839

This is where Thomas Cole sought to find the ideal relationship between humanity and the all-powerful nature, and where Thomas Moran found nature as God’s refuge to the poet- hero, and the idea that by observing- by seeing, one will know God and truth.

Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon with Rainbow, 1912

For Albert Bierstadt, America was vast and full of possibilities- a popular sentiment that helped shape our Nation of brotherhood and humanity. These painters were the very representation Manifest Destiny.

Albert Bierstadt, Storm in the Mountains, 1870

They captured in huge panoramic canvases natural majesty during a time of American expansionism- searching for the balance of human expansion and the preservation of nature.

As American expansionism spread, so did these artists reaction to industrialization, pollution and attitudes towards Native Americans. They became our first environmentalists.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Thomas Moran

Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1904

In Thomas Moran’s painting of Yellowstone we see the very manifestation of God in nature. We, as a people, were so touched by a landscape that embodied the American spirit of who we are that it helped to make Yellowstone our first national park.

Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, 1868

As the Hudson River School gained notoriety (in fact, these artists were the rock stars of their time), paintings became bigger and bolder; more imaginative and more complex. However, it is the early artists such as Kensett (one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Fitz Hugh Lane, with their smooth brush stokes and simple compositions that have remained the most impactful on artists over time. By their clarity, we see a lasting influence on later artists.

The Mountains of Moab 1905 John Singer Sargent 1856-1925 Presented by the heirs of Mrs Ormond 1957 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00124

John Singer Sargent, The Mountains of Moab, 1905

Winslow Homer at Prout’s Neck, Maine, 1900

Winslow Homer’s studio at Prout’s Neck, 1894, where he would study the interaction between land, sea & sky.

We see the isolation and the soulfulness of the landscape; what John Ruskin had called, “measuring the moods of nature.”

Working Title/Artist: Kensett: Newport Rocks Department: Am. Paintings / Sculpture Culture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: Working Date: photography by mma, Digital File APS544.tif retouched by film and media (jnc) 12_14_09

John Frederick Kensett, Newport Rocks, 1872

The influence Luminism had on later artists such as John Singer Sargent, who sought to capture the luminosity of materials; or, Winslow Homer, where painting was not the answer, but the site of a constant and obsessive search, is evident. We can also see their influence on modern artist such as N.C. Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper through their studies of light. Rockwell Kent had said of his wanderings of the wilderness, “I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.”

N.C. Wyeth, Black Spruce Ledge, 1941- What John Ruskin called, “Measuring the mood of Nature.”

Rockwell Kent, Afternoon on the Sea, Mongegan, 1907

Rockwell Kent, Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan, 1907

Edward Hopper- who’s paintings could evoke the very loneliness and isolation of a place, 1930

We see the influences of Martin Johnson Heade’s landscapes on Edward Hopper. The poet Mark Strand referenced the “emotional weight” of Hoppers work, noting that it lifted his painting “into the suggestive, quasi-mystical realm of meditation.”

Martin Johnson Heade, Approaching Thunderstorm, 1859

Edward Hopper, Cobb’s Barns, 1931

Walter Wells said of Edward Hopper’s paintings, “Artist have the power to make us taste what we see, or hear what we feel, to give odorful color, melodious flavor, or a chill wind perceived as a wailing siren or a quivering blue light.”

Even today we see the legacy of the Luminists explorations with current artists such as Tom Curry in Maine and Dennis Blagg in Texas.

Thomas-J.-Curry,-Morning-After-the-Storm,-2000

Tom Curry’s reflection of an Island in Maine, 2000

Dennis Blagg, Passover, 1997

Steven DaLuz

The Luminists of 150 yrs ago left us with a gift; the ability to see our own spirit in nature; a higher awareness of all that is beyond our understanding in which we find beauty. With that, we may find a compassion for nature and the environment that can make us stewards of the American landscape; now, and hopefully long into the future.

Categories: About Michael

Living in a Landscape Without a Care

Mac White

Posted on November 8, 2019

“At Potsdam, at Potsdam there is the wherewithal to make us happy.”

Fredrick the Great from the memoirs of his reader, Henri de Catt – 1758-1760

So dear to his heart, the design for his Summer Palace was based on his own sketches and he would integrate his vision of a simple retreat for family and friends into the landscape.

Sketch by Frederick the Great for the planning of Sans Souci

Grand, yet intimate in scale and plan – the single story Rococo villa was designed and built by Georg W. von Knoblesdorff. The building’s central rotunda was ornamented by sculptural hermes and its framing linear wings evokes a sense of the grandeur of the period, as they overlook the ripple of vine terraces which descend the hill below, where a vineyard and orchard covers six stepped stone curving terraced retaining walls.

Walking the terraces, you can feel Virgil’s inspiration to Frederick, to create a landscape shaped by man but true to nature and most of all the vine. Each wall contains twenty eight inset, glass- doored niches containing figs and vines. Between the niches, espaliered cherries, apricots and peaches are spaced along the stone wall creating a colorful and fragrant fruit orchard, taking full advantage of the variation of seasons.

The terraced vineyard and espaliered orchard

Despite his wishes, the grounds and park of Sans Souci would have a life beyond Fredrick II – he had intended it to be for his life alone and saw it as a living building destined to become a romantic ruin after he was gone. His heir the Crown Prince Frederick William would add his own mark to the park in time, exceed the vision of his father. On lands that at the time were adjacent to Sans Souci, his father would make a Christmas gift of them for his son and his wife to create a place of their own. Working on the foundations of an already existing farm house, Frederick would engage Karl Schinkel with the help of his student Ludwig Persius, to design a small Neo-Classical palace in the image of a roman villa.

Drawing of Schinkel for Charlottenhof Palace

Like his father before him, he was integrally involved in the planning process and worked with both Schinkel and Persius to realize this idealized roman form complete with its inspired interiors, garden spaces and out buildings. In what at first seems a very simple siting of the villa, the experience is as vivid and playful in the garden as it is the interior spaces, all aligned to follow the trajectory of the sun and the play of light during different seasons. Walking up through a vine covered, trellised pergola, the land and your perspective are constantly manipulated to create a distinctive setting within the larger park. Intimate courts with delicately scaled fountains and runnels connect the villa’s portico to an exedra terrace under a dramatic tented vine that carries over to a lower garden court.

Entry stair through elevated arbor pergola

Making a formal connection to, but also leaving behind the Sans Souci, landscape architects Hermann Sello and Peter Joseph Lenne would transform this flat and marshy landscape into an English styled interpretation of the villa form and its gardens with the treatment of follies along wandering paths – discoveries within the broader landscape – like the Schinkel’s elegant Roman Bath House whose loggias and courts create its own exceptional gardenscape whose details and interiors reflect a contemporary expression of the roman myth of our imagination;

or the Chinese Tea House by Johann Buring, whose blending of Rococo ornament with Chinoiserie creates and exotic pavilion to adorn the flower and vegetable garden.

Water color of Sans Souci palace by Author

Categories: About Michael

Separated by Cloth

Devi Norton

Posted on October 18, 2019

When occupying a sturdy building you are in a world between the walls, protected from the weather and the influence of nature. In contrast, if the only thing that separates you from nature is some cloth, nature is closer at hand. Lately, the rise of “glamping” allows people who want to experience the outdoors without roughing it to do so in rustic luxury.

On sites like Glamping-hub there are camps, tepees, yurts and alternative structures all over the world for rent. Varying in amenities from the very minimal to the well appointed, these rental camps offer the experience of sleeping nearly outside, with an emphasis on doing so in style.

Plastic bubble tent, Atrap Reves Bubble Hotel, France

What I think of as modern camping brings to mind brightly colored nylon gear and freeze-dried food, but the idea of lavish camping was promoted in popular culture through the idea of safari. I immediately think of the lavish clothes and tents in movies like “Out of Africa”, “Mogambo” and the Bedouin style of Valentino movies.

Magambo, with Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner and Clark Gable

Safari tent inspired by Out of Africa

A great tent from Son of the Sheik

Tent design by legendary designer William Cameron Menzies

A modern take on the Bedouin Camp

Sometimes when it’s not practical to create a truly outside space, people create rooms that evoke the feeling of a tent inside. An architect and stage designer, Karl Friedrich Schinkel created the famous tent room for the Nuess Pavilion in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Zeltzimmer, Schloss Charlottenhof

Another notable tent room was Empress Josephine’s room for Le Château de Malmaison near Paris. Napoleon’s campaigns abroad stylistically borrowed from the Roman Empire, and led to the popularity of tent rooms and “campaign” decor in general.

“Glamping” blurs the line between camping and more permanent dwellings. The more elaborate they are, the more outfitting them requires a way to move the gear. The history of creating movable structures dates back to the beginning of humanity, and were often fashioned out of resources that were on hand where the structure was needed.

Mammoth bone hut

Early tents would have been made of animal skins and bones, and the earliest known tents were found in Moldova dating from 40,000 B.C. One of several practical shape for tents, the modern materials may have changed, but you can see the influence of the first tents on design to this day.

Another popular style used for modern glamping is the Tipi, or Tepee, based on the native american tipi’s of the american west.

Lakota Tipi

Blackfoot Indian tipi

El Cosmico, Marfa, TX

Tents were a practical way to house traveling armies on campaigns, and have been long associated with the military.

From Book of the Knight Zifar

WW I tent city in front of the pyramids of Giza, Egypt, Mena Camp

Roman army frieze showing details of the Roman tent

Classic Ottoman Army tents

Yurts are another structure with a long history. A traditional house in Mongolia and Tibet, they are now particularly popular in remote places where they are easy to construct and heat.

Mongolian ger or yurt

Traditional layout of the Ger

Ski in yurts in Yellowstone

Modern yurt house

There are many famous tent based resorts all over the world, but one that is known for its rustic luxury is Calyoquot Wilderness resort in Canada. Their marketing phrase is “experience luxury gone wild”, and they create an experience exactly in line with the desires of people who seek this kind of travel.

Calyoquot Wilderness resort, Canada

Camping or “glamping”, there is something special about freeing yourself from the comforts of buildings to sleep outside. Over the summer, many people will head somewhere to sleep under the stars, letting the wind blow through the fabric of the tent walls–just as people always have.

Categories: About Michael

Tagged: Calyoquot Wilderness Resort, camping, glamping, tents, tipi, yurt

The Houses of Georgia O’Keeffe

Mac White

Posted on October 11, 2019

“Well! Well! Well! This is wonderful. No one told me it was like this!” – Upon arriving in New Mexico

Palo Duro Canyon

Finding her way to Northern New Mexico was not an escape from the bustle of New York, but a rediscovery of the wide open spaces that had first inspired her abstract watercolors that captured the vastness of West Texas with its broad, open skies over the plains in Canyon, Texas contrasting against the dramatic landscape of the nearby Palo Duro Canyon. It was here that she first revealed her fascination with abstraction as a means of expression, while heading the art department at West Texas State Normal College.

Georgia O'Keeffe Light Coming on the Plains II 1917, watercolor on paper Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 1966.32

Light Coming on the Plains, 1917 watercolor on newsprint

No. 15 Special, 1917 charcoal on newsprint

After excursions to New Mexico during the summers in the early 30’s, she would trade the shadowy canyons of the growing metropolis in New York for the vibrant colors that marked the walls nearby cliffs and distant mountain views that framed the boundaries of Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch located twenty miles north of the village of Abiquiu . The poignant beauty of this high dessert setting would become the inspiration of here work for years to come, providing the perfect foil to her creative yearnings and provide a setting that would become her home. Here the red rock cliffs rise up from the pinons and cottonwoods, where outcroppings stand jagged against the cerulean blue of the of the New Mexico sky where the clouds reflect the landscape below in their own composition.

Abiquiu

Ghost Ranch redrock cliffs

Her summer place at Ghost Ranch was known as Rancho de los Burros, the former home of Arthur Pack – who had run the dude ranch. This simple, austere U- shaped adobe structure became her studio and would itself provide the framework for many of her paintings. With windows looking out at inspiration in every direction, from simple views across sage dotting he desert plains, to the corner windows at the breakfast room gazing upon the cliff walls that provided the vision for red and Yellow Cliffs – an early painting dating from 1940. Its outward focus was echoed in her work while its interior was reflective of a woman whose life was stripped of pretense and was focused on joy of simple living and finding beauty in the ordinary.

Breakfast room at Ghost Ranch

Untitled(Red and Yellow Cliffs), 1940, oil on canvas

Studio at Ghost Ranch

dam-images-homes-2002-03-okeefe-hosl12_okeefe

Studio at Ghost Ranch

Nothing would affect her passion for this landscape more that than the Cerro Pedernal, a narrow mesa that translates at “flint hill”. Its presence dominates the horizon, it flat peak reaching up to the clouds. She felt a spiritual connection with this mountain, and this constant in the landscape became a feature that was repeated throughout many of her works.

Ghost Ranch and Pedernal

Pedernal – 1941, oil on canvas

“It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I paint it enough, I could have it”, she would joke later in her life.

The house was not her only home in this wilderness, though – she would often drive out into the desert to find her inspiration, camping and painting from the mobile studio of her Model A Ford.

O’Keeffe in the filed with her model A

“She would remove the driver’s seat. Then she would unbolt the passenger car, turn it around to face the back seat. Then she would lay the canvas on the back seat as an easel and paint inside her Model-A Ford.” The car would also provide a respite from the harsh elements and unrelenting desert sun. A favorite of her excursion, “the Black Place” is a stretch of hill and arroyos – black, silver and grey on the landscape, located in the Bisti Badlands in Navajo Country north of Ghost Ranch. Her assistant Maria Chabot described it as “… the black hills-black and grey and silver with arroyos of white sand curving around them-pink and white strata running through them. They flow downward, one below the next. Incredible stillness!”

Camping at the Black Place

Black Place II, 1944, oil on canvas

The desert would also provide another element whose abstractions would motivate her artistic explorations – the bleached bones.

“When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too…. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it”

Collection of found sun-bleached bones at Ghost Ranch

Entry Portal at her winter home in Abiquil by Y. Karsh, 1956

“To me they are as beautiful as anything I know … they are strangely more living than the animals walking around…. 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”

Deer’s skull with Perdernal , 1936, oil on canvas

Always wanting to have a bit more land, enough for a horse and a garden, she began to look for a true place of her own, the Ghost ranch was really just a summer place, and in 1945 she purchased a small adobe structure that not much more than a ruin and spent the next four years restoring and adding to it. This also allowed her view that related both to the landscape and to the home, allowing her to paint from the studio in winter months. She would also often paint from her bedroom, a former wagon shed with a simple corner fireplace, overlooking the Chama River valley or her patio – a sunlit interior court. This court would become a recurring image with in her body of work, studied as light and shadow tracked across the space from season to season.

“That wall with a door in it was something I had to have. It took me ten years to get it- three more years to fix the house so I could live in it- and after that the wall with a door was painted many times.”

Bedroom at Abiquiu

O’keeffe courtyard at Abiquiu, Annie Leibovitz

Patio with Cloud, 1956, oil on canvas

Georgia-O-Keeffe-xx-Patio-with-Black-Door-1955

Patio with Black Door, 1955, oil on canvas

In the Patio VIII, 1950, oil on canvas

Back Door with Snow, 1955, oil on canvas

The house was a place, simple in form and detail, but as composed as her art. Everything had a meaningful aesthetic place. The studio, once a windowless room that served as a cattle pen, now opens out to the broad vistas of the surrounding New Mexico landscape. The sitting room’s door opens to the patio, itself becoming the subject of one of her abstract studies of that space. The Roofless Room, an open air space with a ceiling of log beams and vigas, allows light to filter though –shadow playing against the plaster walls and dirt floor.

Studio at Abiquiu home

Sitting room at Abiquiu

Door though window, 1956, oil on canvas

Roofless Room, used as a sculpture studio later in her life

The patio was also the portal to escape to the sky, four walls of earthen materials framing the expanse of the heavens, day or night. She would often climb to the roof and sleep both in Abiquiu and at the Ghost Ranch.

Ladder in the patio at Abiquiu

Ladder to the Moon, 1958, oil on canvas

As I see the way that she found a new modern interpretation of beauty in the contradictory subtleness and drama of the New Mexico landscape, it was by immersing herself there in these homes that she found both her exuberant creativity, as well as inner joy and peace. I am reminded of the thoughts of another great lover of the landscape of this area, J. B. Jackson whose writing brought perspective to our understanding of the vernacular landscape.

“The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence” – J B Jackson – Landscape in Sight: Looking at America

Georgia in her patio

Categories: About Michael

The blog of Michael G Imber Architects

Living in a Landscape Without a Care

Mac White

Posted on January 17, 2020

A Holiday Treat

Mac White

Posted on December 20, 2019

Preserving Uriarte

Angela Gallegos

Posted on December 6, 2019

The Luminist

Michael Imber

Posted on November 22, 2019

Living in a Landscape Without a Care

Mac White

Posted on November 8, 2019

Separated by Cloth

Devi Norton

Posted on October 18, 2019

The Houses of Georgia O’Keeffe

Mac White

Posted on October 11, 2019