How to Read Paintings: Blue and Green Music by Georgia O’Keeffe
A fascinating abstract painting inspired by New York
It can sometimes be difficult at first to get a grip on an abstract painting.
Abstractions make their presence known through colours and shapes, through a type of gestural theatre, a dance, a body language. Yet without definite symbolism to pin meaning to, paintings like this can be perplexing objects to interpret.
The paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe add further intricacy because there is often something overtly reminiscent in their forms. Echoes of real-life objects not explicitly described can occupy her paintings like displaced memories.
I’ve been trying for some time to place my finger on exactly how this painting, Blue and Green Music, perpetrates its magnetic effect.
What is going on in this painting? Especially down there, just off-screen to the lower right, from where all the motion and flow seem to issue from?
The image hovers somewhere between illusion and reality. There is a definite sense of upward motion, and it’s hard not to think of the sky…
