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Doug Davis/O'Keeffe interview 11-76 [[symbol]] checkmark [[/symbol]] O'Keefe interview etc! pineapple story. i had to paint my pineapple in new york. i do not have ahouse at abique. iIve lived there longer than ny other place, tho. it's a good place to be. one isn't as tough as the 80's as in the 30's. in those days I painted in a car, in an old model A car. i took the right-hand seat out and i would turn around and paint a 30 or 40 inch canvas in the back. you can't do that out here. it can get terribly hot around 3 or 4 in the afternoon and the bees can decide they want to be in the car with you. i came out here because of the earth colors--the ochres and the reds. they are the same colors that are on your palette. the hills out here look like they are painted. often people from the East, from the green country come out here and think it will be easy to paint the hills for this reason. but they fail. the hills aren't easy to paint. the people from the green country wind up painting the hills green, painting where they came from. the green country was not for me. itried painting at lake george for many years. its very pretty but its not painting country. at least not for me. the feel of the place isn't my kind of feeling. its difficult out here. you think you have the earth color on your palette but you cant get it--theres too much grit in it. i struggled a lot trying to mix the color and then gave up. its too much trouble. now you can buy it in a tube. it was a verynice place, lake george, but i finall gave it up to come out here. i wanted to getoff my myself, aways from the new york crowd. i am a lone person. as for stieglitz and his gallery. you people in the art world now dont understand that outside of what he showed you couldn't see anything of interest in new york in those days. there wasnt anything to make a person think he could find a direction of his own. i didnt understand some of the things he showed but it was a new wave, i knew that. it showed you how you could make up your mind what to paint. i didn't want to paint like all the others--why do that, and besides i could imporve on them. sargents was very important then: i couldn't compete with sargetn. im a lone person. i cant have people around me when im working. stiglitz was the opposite. he didnt mind. the first year is was out here i stayed with tony luhan-mable dodge's [[strikethrough]] wife [[/strikethrough]] husband-in d.h. lawrences old house. [[strikethrough]] thak [[/strikethrough]] it sat across an alfalfa field. i could always run across that field and slip even beyond that, beyond the bushes, where no one ever went. i could run across the field you see and meet the world, whichever i wanted, because the world comes to mable's house, in those days. yes, the world comes to me here. there is a lot of mail. jian is quite unpleasant to many of the tourists, particularly the unannounced visitors in the summer. often i will go right up to them and say very directly what can i do for you today. it surprises them, to be asked specifically. i gout with my hand on my hip and ask them what they want. they dont expect that. once someone said i just came to see you, so i turned to my left, to my right, and around, and then walked away. they had seen every side of me. DD 11/9/76 [[left margin]] GEORGIA (O'KEEFFE) [[/left margin]]
