Curator, Samantha Friedman: No. 8 is a dense, dizzying, charcoal drawing with a spiraling form in which she modulates the tones of charcoal that she uses.
Conservator, Laura Neufeld: She achieves warm blacks, cool blacks, grays, this whole sweep of textures and colors.
I’m Laura Neufeld. I’m an Associate Paper Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art.
She’s doing that simply by altering how she’s applying it. So pressing hard on the stick, pressing soft on the stick, blending areas with her fingers or with a rag, and sometimes going over a line multiple times to build up this dark outline.
Samantha Friedman: Right next to No. 8 is a watercolor called Blue I, and when O'Keeffe said, “I have made this drawing several times,” she was referring to works like this, in which she revisits a composition in an entirely different medium.
Laura Neufeld: When O'Keeffe decided to start using color and move beyond simply using charcoal, blue is the color that she first introduced into her palette. It feels, still, very related to the charcoal drawing. But now she's using the brush and diluting the paint to create lighter or darker blues. And I think that you can almost imagine that she was trying to figure out, how can I change this by changing the medium? Sometimes she talked about doing something until it "felt right."
Samantha Friedman: And we're reminded that she's not going into a work knowing everything already, but she's finding the answers through the making of multiple works.