O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree
About this video
Steven and Beth look at Georgia O'Keeffe's The Lawrence Tree (1929), painted at D.H. Lawrence's ranch in New Mexico. The unusual view, looking up a tree trunk at the night sky, makes us see through the artist's eyes and stirs feelings about time, scale and our place in the universe.
You'll be able to
- explain the unusual viewpoint O'Keeffe uses in The Lawrence Tree.
- describe how changes of scale suggest both space and time.
- explain why the painting might be hung in different directions.
Key words
- Point of view
- The position from which we seem to see a scene in a painting.
- Scale
- How big or small things appear compared to each other.
- Sublime
- A feeling of awe at something vast or overwhelming, like the endless sky.
Transcript
(piano music playing) Steven: We're in the remarkable Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut and we're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's The Lawrence Tree. It's really early O'Keeffe. It dates to 1929.
Beth: It doesn't look like a tree at all. It looks almost like this organic octopus-like form, but when you just stop for a second and look at it, you can see that we're looking up at the branches of a tree, like we often do when we're lying on the grass and looking up at the sky.
Steven: I mean, we always take over the artist's view in a sense, when we look at a painting. But because the view is so unusual here, in some ways, we really inhabit her eyes as she's looking up at that clear, night sky.
Beth: There's something incredibly poignant about it. We become her or we see through her eyes at a very particular moment in a very particular view on a very particular night. I have a strong sense of the passage of time and the momentary and how human life is so brief, a whole set of things that happened because of this unusual point of view.
Looking up through the tree at the night sky, the subject and the point of view come together. I almost feel the nighttime and this tree and the smell of the pine.
Steven: Space and time are beautifully interwoven. Our eye travels up that trunk. We're lying just just below. O'Keeffe spoke about how there was a carpenter's bench just at the base of this tree, that she liked to lie on. This was painted on D.H. Lawrence's ranch during her first summer in New Mexico.
There's something very particular about the way our eye travels up the tree and then past this wildlike form that are the needles of the pine and then beyond that, the sky which intrudes and just comes towards us and of course recedes infinitely in dome of that sky.
The radical changes of scale, speak of both space and time, our minuteness and our rootedness in this much larger, celestial space.
Beth: There is that pulling down and that sense of rootedness in the earth and at the same time that sublime suggestion of the infinite and the blue and the way that it
Steven: Yes. Steven: Apparently, the artist felt that this painting could be hung in any direction, but the museum has hung it in a way that she seemed to have preferred.
Beth: She instructed that the tree appear to be standing on its head. (piano music playing)
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