It was the first frost yesterday in Kansas. The first frost of this fall season. I noticed the ice on my windshield had formed. It is a bit later than usual. But, I thought to myself, when are the seasons ever “as usual” anymore in the age of Climate change. It is predicted that there may only be 60 harvests left in America due to the increase unpredictability of seed access, the health of the soil, and impending extreme weather. I walked in my neighborhood today and was struck by a tree that had changed dramatically in the last few days. I feel like I know my trees in the neighborhood. Each day I notice a slight change, a leaf down, a new bud holding on, not sure what season it is. How many more autumns can we count on, to see the leaves change?  

My fall musing brought my imagination and memory to a more unusual painting from one of my beloved artists, Georgia O’Keeffe. It was apt timing, I was just reading about a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, (the first retrospective of hers in France) and an exhibit featuring rarely seen photographs in Houston, Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer. Her work and gumption has guided much of my love of the American Southwest, the desert, and learning to look deeply into nature. Well-known for her paintings of flowers and skulls of the American Southwest landscape, I thought of a unique painting I disliked very much when I first saw it in person in 2013. I saw the painting, Autumn’s Leaves - Lake George, while working on an exhibition at the de Young, Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George, which focused on her time in upstate New York along with Alfred Stieglitz, her husband, lover, collaborator, gallerist, advocate, friend, and famous for his photography in his own right. *(Sidenote: If you are ever in the mood to remind yourself that love exists between humans, pick up My Faraway One - Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. All 815 pages of it is one of my cherished possessions with goodbye notes from my museum colleagues when I departed the de Young and Legion of Honor in 2015. You will not regret reading these beautiful letters of two incredible artists of the 20th century. The care and admiration they show for one another are words that I have hung onto for some years. “I love you, Dearest One, if I am capable of love. I often wonder, am I? But if I am, it’s you there with me in the great white stillness - where there is a great peace & no ugliness. — No voices with edges that tear.” Alfred Stieglitz, September 25, 1923 ) Ah, back to the painting.

First, the painting doesn’t photograph that well in comparison to some of her other more dynamic paintings of flowers, or the drama of skulls of dead cattle. Autumn Leaves is a darker palette, smaller canvas, with a hint of chill in the air. It is a pile of dead leaves, not her vibrant flowers of a desert spring. Fall ushers us towards the cold and lonely winter. From 1918 until 1934, Georgia O'Keeffe lived in Lake George part of the year at Stieglitz's family estate located in New York's Adirondack Park. Georgia was spending a lot of time alone where she learned to garden and had space outside of the city to connect to the land. I like that she paints the leaves on the ground before they deteriorate and become part of the soil. This theme of capturing a part of the regenerative cycle becomes a central subject in her work, the skull in the barren desert, holding its form in spite of the sun. O’Keeffe paints resilience. Things that hold on. And maybe she painted the opposite of what critics, curators, and others constantly put upon her and their obsession with the female genitalia. Maybe the work has to do with looking at a leaf and seeing it for what they are. Are we too afraid to look at the world as it is, deteriorating - just like the leaves. Or is another world possible, one of renewal? First, we must see it for what it is. “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.” -Georgia O’Keeffe.

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