[WILF] Georgia O’Keeffe & Ochre
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Welcome to What I Learned From… “Exact realism does not equal awe. I had to create an equivalent for what I was looking at—not copy it.” ― Georgia O’Keeffe What I Learned From …Last month I took a trip to Fort McClary, one of those old stone-and-cannon sites here in the northeastern US that practically dares you to abandon your phone and remember how to imagine. Salt air, creaking boats in the harbor, sun just warm enough to forget about inboxes. Tucked at the edge of the fort, alongside the forest hiking trails, was something unexpected: a historic garden. Just a few raised beds filled with herbs and flowers. Each bed held the flora that would have grown there in that century; agrimony and lavender in the 1600s, mint and yarrow in the 1800s. Nothing extravagant; nothing designed for selfies or spectacle. But as I wandered through the rows, the colors caught me. Deep violet spikes. Bright golden clusters. Stark whites with just the faintest blue or green tinge in the petals. The whole garden had been painted in boldness, but someone had deliberately selected the palette. It's not just purple or yellow or white, though. It's dozens of purples. Yellows-within-yellows. Cool whites that shift depending on the light. If you tried to pull a color swatch from a single petal, your screen would give you fifty hex codes, and still not quite catch the right one. We live in a world where every color is available to us. You can open an app and slide through infinite hues. You can find filters, presets, overlays, palettes, and plugins for just about everything. But what if all those choices flatten our attention? What if the way to make something rich is to intentionally limit the options? That’s what Georgia O’Keeffe did. Especially during her years in the New Mexico desert, O’Keeffe worked within a tightly limited palette. Earth tones. Bone white. Sky blue. The warm ochre of sand and the dry green of sage. She wasn’t painting the whole world, she was painting her world. And within that palette, she didn’t just pick a color and use it. She studied it. Explored every depth and variation. Her whites held shadows and light, the grit of gypsum dust clinging to sun-bleached bone. Sky blues were never flat cerulean, but the slow fade of horizon into heat. She’d spend hours mixing a single gray to match the exact moment a storm rolled through. The restraint wasn’t an exhibit in minimalism. It was depth. She didn’t need every hue on the wheel. It reminded me how easy it is to confuse abundance with mastery. We chase better platforms. New tools. More apps. Another metric to track or trend to test. When we feel unsure or uninspired, we look outward. Maybe if I had a new workflow? Maybe if I joined that cohort? Maybe if I changed my whole aesthetic? Again. (Oof. Guilty. 🤚) But what if we’re just avoiding the work of going deeper with what we already have? O’Keeffe’s genius wasn’t in her range, it was in her attention. And the more I study the creatives I admire, the more I notice how often they choose a limited palette. Not in subject, but in tone and structure. In the way they adjust and adapt their voice. They know the forms that let them go deep, and they stick with them long enough to find nuance. You don’t need every genre to prove your skill, or every platform to find your audience. We don’t need to splash out in bright new colors every week just to stay visible. Instead, we need to learn to sit with the colors we’ve already picked. Let the purple go deeper. Let the yellow shift in the light. See how the empty black adds shadow and the bright white adds lightness. Wonder if your primary school education was correct…is black the absence of all the colors, or the existence of all the colors mixed together? Dive in. Let the pigment bloom across the page as you add water. Watch how it lifts, settles, shifts. Our palette holds more than it first appears to. Fewer colors don’t limit us. They open the possibility to go deeper. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “One thing that is always with the writer — no matter how long he has written or how good he is — is the continuing process of learning how to write. As soon as the writer ‘learns how to write,’ as soon as he knows what he is going to find, and discovers a way to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way to say nothing, he is finished. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.” — Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Describe a memory through just three details…like O’Keeffe’s bone, shadow, heat. No additional adjectives allowed. Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Undight [UHN-dahyt] (v.) — To unmake with purpose. From Middle English undighten (“to strip or remove”), which traces back to Old English dihtan, from Latin dictare (“to order or dictate.”) To undight something was to undo it. In medieval texts knights undighted their armor, travelers undighted their cloaks, and scribes undighted whole passages. It wasn’t destruction, it was clarity by removal. A precise decision to reveal. Sorta Synonyms: strip, pare, distill Use it for: Undoing an arrangement. Editing a paragraph until the bones show. Taking off the armor so you can actually move. Want to read more in-depth GOTF entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Highbrow sends you short, 10-day email courses on topics like creativity, art, and storytelling. One idea a day. Five minutes at a time. Perfect if you're ready to stop skimming and start going deeper. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Speaking of things I know I should cut back on, but you’ll have to pry from my cold dead hands… ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - One more time, if you have 90 seconds to give me some quick feedback on what kind of writer you want to be (and how I can help you get there) it would be super valuable. |