Some Thoughts on Series 1, no.8 (1919) (KV)

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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 Heaven and Earth sprang. 

It is there within us all the while;

Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry. 

   (Tr. Waley)




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