Color Is One of the Great Things in the World — Georgia O'Keeffe

“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me, and I’ve come to think of painting as a way of making my unknown known.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

Oy — it’s been a rough past month. Work and super‑hard life decisions about pruning my copious activities and reducing costs at my brick‑and‑mortar studio in my small town of Petaluma. Painful, but necessary.

And yet — teaching art this week saved my temporary saggy spirit (yet again).

Showing up as a teacher, not spiraling, is the balm my mind most needs.

As I continue to teach my Great Artist’s Footsteps class on Georgia O’Keeffe, I keep soaking up powerful bits of her wisdom and her techniques. Five weeks is the ideal amount of time to immerse ourselves in her world — experimenting with her bold, colorful, and challenging art‑making techniques. As the teacher, I get to prepare, research, and plan for the class — which has given me unimaginable gifts for my own art‑making process. My beginning art students’ work has flourished using these “inspired by Georgia” methods.

My own painting (not totally finished) felt as though I, too, was making the unknown known through color and movement in the painting process. I felt so energized and engaged as I dipped purples, blues, and warm hues into my messy but inviting palettes. I wanted to channel Georgia’s seeing of color and shapes, and not merely replicate what I was seeing.

Color is what makes me want to make art. When I mix colors on my palette, I experience something so joyful — it’s otherworldly to me.

Observing, laughing, and proudly reflecting on my Georgia O’Keeffe class has been the most wonderful journey for me as a teacher this past month. We are having such fun with a class that allows us to focus, experiment, and find unexpected delight in emulating Georgia O’Keeffe’s work.

“Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts, since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” — John Steinbeck

A small art‑making exercise

• Find a natural object — a leaf, a flower, a shell.
• Snap a photo of it.
• Make it big — enlarge or crop the photo and find a section you find interesting.
• Draw on paper, with a pen, the big lines and shapes you see. Try not to worry about what you are drawing. Study the photo instead.

Voilà.

— Eliz