OGT DAILY - Day Sixty Four PERSPECTIVE

"The winds of God's grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sail."  Krishnarama

I went to bed feeling restless; needing a change: new job, new house, new political climate, new perspective.

I woke this morning at 6:30 having to take the dog out.   Then did my morning stretches and found the change there.   A spaciousness and ease in the body despite the usually cranky aches and pains; the sciatic hip, the slightly shorter left leg and buckling knee.   Aaah such a gift!  The quote I found in Joan Boryshenko's book of daily meditations from Krishnarama seemed apt.

I went for a walk for the first time in several weeks despite the dirty banks of frozen snow and lack of sidewalks; the twenty degree weather and my current sore throat.  I walked for five miles and the first thing that greeted me as I stepped out the door was a Georgia O'Keefe cloud sky.

I've seen this painting or one like it at The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.   The sky this morning was that exact shade of pale cobalt with a touch of pink and those continuous rows of cotton ball clouds.  How's that for new perspective?   A sky I would hoist my sale into any day and I did. Walking the length of Warburton Avenue into Yonkers toward the Hudson Museum I heard numerous woodpeckers and saw one close up who was calling above me.  An unusual sound I've never heard before.    

From: Georgia O’Keeffe in An American Place Exhibition Brochure, 1944:

“I was the sort of child that ate the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut saving either the raisin or the hole for the last and best. So, probably – not having changed much – when I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones – what I saw through them – particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world . . . They were most wonderful against the Blue – That Blue that will always be there after all man’s destruction is finished.”

(quoted in Drohojowska-Philp 404)

From Liz Brindley, Curatorial Intern at The Georgia O'Keefe Museum:

"O’Keeffe spent much of her time looking up through the lens of these bones, or out toward the distant clouds of the open skies on the horizon. But eventually the artist changed her perspective from below the clouds to up above when she started traveling internationally by plane. She began to paint what she saw from this bird’s-eye perspective:

O'Keefe with Sky Above Clouds IV 

When I re-plant my feet on the ground after O’Keeffe takes me up in the sky, I see more light, space, and realize the unfathomably infinite ways in which we can see this world. Georgia O’Keeffe’s cloud paintings speak to me this summer as the fluffy formations drift in and out over us, sprinkling rain here and there.  Standing beneath these expanses, and above them in O’Keeffe’s paintings, broadens our perspectives, leads our eyes upward in captivated stares where we can float away into daydreams of what Miss O’Keeffe might think of these rainy days."

Taken from Georgia O'Keefe Museum Blog post: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/2015/07/13/head-in-the-clouds-draft-unfinished/