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About Painting Desert Bones

I have picked flowers where I found them - 

Have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked

When I found the beautiful white bones of the desert I picked them up and took them home too

I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it

A pelvis bone has always been useful to any animal that has it - quite as useful as a head I suppose. For years in the country the pelvis bones lay about the house indoors and out - always underfoot - seen and not seen as such things can be - seen in many different ways. I do not remember picking up the first one but I remember from when I first noticed them always knowing I would one day be painting them. A particularly beautiful one that I found on the mountain where I went fishing this summer started me working on them

I was the sort of child that ate around 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 as it is now after all man's destruction is finished

I have tried to paint the Bones and the Blue 

Georgia O'Keeffe

LIST OF PAINTINGS 1943

1. Pelvis - Front
2. Pelvis - Side
3. Pelvis with Pedernal
4. Pelvis with the Moon
5. Pelvis with the Distance
6. Pelvis with Shadows and the Moon
7. Pelvis - 
8. Cottonwood Tree
9. Cottonwood Tree in Spring
10. Dead Cottonwood Tree
11. Dead Piñón Tree
12. Pedernal - my front yard
13. Cliffs beyond Abiquiu - my back yard
14. Cliffs beyond Abiquiu - Dry Waterfall
15. White Flower on Red Earth I
16. White Flower on Red Earth II
17. Head with Broken Pot - 1943
18. Horns
19. The Black Place -