Curator, Samantha Friedman: In 1922, O’Keeffe goes to York Beach in Maine and we get this very intense pair of pastels. These look so strange and mysterious. And then when you read her descriptions of this storm unfolding, they make perfect sense all of a sudden.
Actor (Georgia O’Keeffe): I began hurrying home—walking into a most wonderful purplish—gray yellow—gray pink storm cloud with lightning streaking through it. . . and the moon looking too foolish and yellow for words—in a patch of bright blue sky—just looking on at all this madness.
Conservator, Laura Neufeld: The sky looks like a bruise, it just looks so ominous and angry, and this churning, dark ocean are perfect for pastel where she could build up these solid, saturated colors. As we often see in her career, paper is what she uses when she’s visiting new places, because it’s portable, it’s faster, and that’s something that pastel affords her.
Samantha Friedman: We often think about her forms as organic or soft and here we get these harsh angles. Unlike other pastels, where she really smoothly modulates the transitions between one color and another, here she’s leaving certain moments unblended, where you get an almost dissonant transition between one color and the next.
Laura Neufeld: These works are so vigorous and expressive and moody and dynamic, I think you feel her excitement and awe and terror at this storm.