Through Georgia's Eyes (review)

This impressionistic account of artist Georgia O'Keeffe's life starts with her Wisconsin childhood, where she "roams the prairie" and "struggles to show on paper what she sees." Despite parental objection to her unfeminine artistic ambitions, she attends art school and moves to the city, but she finally finds her most congenial landscape in "the Faraway" of New Mexico, where she explores the shapes and colors of her surroundings in her paintings. Like Bryant's Georgia's Bones (BCCB 3/05), this is more an evocation of an artistic sensibility than a biography; that's a tall order, and the text does occasionally dip into sentimental nature cliché ("The trees and hills whisper their secrets. They are friends, always there for her"), but it also offers some effective images ("She sees a long line of cows above, black lace against a dusky sky"). The cut-paper collages sometimes muster interesting organic shapes, but they're too often peopled by cutesy and doll-like figures in total contradiction to O'Keeffe's piercing natural vision. This isn't up to the mark set by Winter's My Name Is Georgia (BCCB 11/98), but it could be an interesting introduction to O'Keeffe's work or to the artistic viewpoint in general. Though there are no source notes, a final page gives a bit more biographical information about the artist.