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SUNDAY MORNING

8/30/81

7

MORTON: A long time ago, when I was a kid, I remember standing in Chicago's Art Institute, looking at strong, spare paintings of a land, well, not of emptiness, a lot of sky. Later, I learned the landscape was the red hills of New Mexico. The painter of course was Georgia O'Keefe, who made that landscape one of the most beautiful American images. This summer a composer tried to capture O'Keefe and her land in music. Our cameras went to Santa Fe to hear that music and to meet O'Keefe, who will be 94 years old on her next birthday. She was going for a walk with her assistant Juan Hamilton, and she let the camera come along.

GEORGIA O'KEEFE: It was so big that they - nobody had been able to afford to fence it. And the water came from a spring at the foot of a cliff, over there beyond - beyond where they found the dinosaur.

MORTON: She knows the country. She knows this land.

O'KEEFE: You can get up on those little hills, but you can't climb -

JUAN HAMILTON: Some of those cliffs are -

O'KEEFE: There's only one place you can climb up, and that's over there.

MORTON: The artist Georgia O'Keefe started spending her summers in this part of New Mexico more than 50 years ago.

O'KEEFE: Oh, and the country, my God! I saw the country from the hill up there. The road went up high over the hill, and I looked out on this valley at the - the red hills that go off and off, and these cliffs go quite a long distance.

MORTON: "Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant," Georgia O'Keefe once wrote. "It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest." She's been here now for many years, at the Abiqui and Ghost Ranch. And her vision and art have made it hers.

O'KEEFE: Well, certainly it's mine. Nobody else has looked at it so long or painted it so often. It became mine. I've looked at it so long. And there's a leaping deer on it in a bare space; there's a -- it looks as if there's a leaping deer near the top.

MORTON: It is an enchanted land, this home of Georgia O'Keefe. (Music) It is also home for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

(Chamber music excerpt)