View from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Studio

How many artists are lucky enough to have a view like this from their studios? It took Georgia O’Keeffe ten years to persuade the Catholic Church to sell her the four acre plot with delapidated adobe buildings together with the all important water rights that had been on the title since the 1700’s.

Another three years elapsed of rebuilding and remodeling which kept the essence of the adobe dwelling, but imbued it with a light filled modernist feel. O’Keeffe moved there in 1949 in at the age of sixty-two.

The house is now a museum, left is it was when she left in 1984 two years prior to her death, with even the large jars of herbs, gathered and dried from the vegetable garden, still neatly lined up in the large kitchen pantry.

I stood in front of the expansive studio windows alongside others who were rapidly snapping with their iPhones, as the tour guide, ever so politely, urged us all towards bus.

Thousands of pictures of this view must reside in photographic holiday memories of those who have passed through, but I felt blessed to be at this place at the precise time when the afternoon light and the clouds produced photographic magic.