My Recognition--Mr. Salinas

 




                I have found myself thinking often since our last meeting about the question raised as to why we approach our analysis of O'Keeffe's more abstract work differently from our analysis of her depiction of trees. We found ourselves almost haunted by the endless possibilities of interpretation when presented with a non-literal image, but were, for the most part, rigidly introspective concerning our relationship to trees. I have to say that I had not really personally grappled with this topic before our last seminar. However, suddenly when presented with the topic, I too found myself captured by the strange intimacy that they presented. When tasked with painting a tree it felt like a no-brainer to paint the tree that lays just outside the window of my dorm, a tree that I had unconsciously become extremely acquainted with. I was struck by painting it at how automatically it felt for me to commit it to paper. I realized that I knew the bend of its branches, the way one of its trunks builds off another, and all its crooks and ridges. This tree has been the most consistent witness to my life as of late, but, whether I had noticed it or not, I too have similarly given it my attention. I focused on its structure due to the consequences of the current season, but also because I felt like its body was more integral to its being. By the time I finished my small painting, I caught myself only wanting to accurately portray my perspective of this rather unremarkable tree if for no other reason but that I recognized that it meant something to me. I possess it. Perhaps it is this kind of recognition that makes us more attached to the trees in O'Keeffe's paintings as subjects in their own right. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 13, 2022 at 4:53 PM

    Wonderful. You capture perfectly how we can spontaneously enter into a relationship with a particular tree without even being aware of it, and how the eye of the heart follows the shape and angles of the living wood. Does the visual imagination create a kind of intimacy with the object that eludes words? -- an intimacy that is intense precisely because it doesn't replace the object with an idea?

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