InfinityOnTheHorizonLine

Why are we as philosophers seemingly only concerned with what lies beyond the physical? Our curriculum is saturated with thinkers who so desperately want to shed their physical reality, to escape into the intellect. Why do our beloved philosophers exist in a state of self-hatred? Unfeeling? Why are they unable to see what is in front of them? The faculties of pure intellect are interesting, of course, but I am so much more concerned with what it is to be man. There are moments when our spirits fill our bodies like a golden light, perfectly describing our individual shapes. I couldn’t imagine that this is done in the intellect. How could it be? The physical is the medium of our spirits!!! I am enamored with the tiny little things of life. Things that are so uniquely human.  I feel that repetition falls to the side much like physicality in philosophy. I feel that people are quick to judge repetition, condemning it to " mundanity." But the feeling of repetition and the expressio...

​ Anyone who has peered closely into the insides of a flower will recognize this immediately as a semi-abstract image of floral sexual organs, with other connotations. I was moved in our discussion by the evocation of a splitting-open, a flesh-wound (look at those colors), a stigma releasing an outflow of heavenly blue sap. There is pain and at the same time freedom. (The stigma in a flower is also the part of the pistil where the pollen germinates! -- so botanically a flower has a stigma.)    The vertical symmetry of the painting also suggests an unfolding, as of two sides facing each other: maternal twins presiding over the flow of generation. No doubt O'Keeffe also had in mind the two sides of a deep river canyon, as in these images of the Taos Gorge and the Kali Gandaki Gorge (Nepal): Poem 6 of the Dao De Jing expresses this primal image thus: The Valley Spirit never dies. It is named the Mysterious Female. And the doorway of the Mysterious Female Is the base from which He...

                                                                    "The Beyond," 1972 "The unexlainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding -- to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just overthe next hill." (Georgia O'Keeffe) This blog is a collective exploration of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings and of the nature of art through the lens of these paintings. We'll read individual paintings like poems, attempt basic experiments inspired by O'Keeffe and Arthur Wesley Dow, and reflect on what art is and does -- and we'll respond to each other, because the blog is above all a conversation.