Blue-04 1916

Georgia O’Keeffe made this painting, Blue-04, with watercolor on paper. It's now hanging out at the Brooklyn Museum. Imagine O’Keeffe with her brush and a pot of blue pigment. The juicy puddles of colour blend and bleed into the thin paper surface. It’s almost like she’s coaxing these shapes into existence. It's cool how the watery paint has a mind of its own, right? She’s playing with these deep blues, letting them drip and fade. The two curved forms at the top feel like a response to landscape, like a memory of a sky, or maybe the inside of a flower. The broad brushstrokes at the bottom feel like a counterpoint to the more fluid forms above. I see a connection to Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain paintings. These artists are in dialogue, trying to find new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling through paint. Painting is like a conversation between artists across time, each one riffing off the others.