Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch

I thought someone could tell me how to paint a landscape.

-Georgia O’Keeffe

Light, paints. Casts the desert in colour, turns over the earth at dawn to raise up cliffs of bruised gold, yellow-green and cracked red rock. Is it the eye that paints, or the light. The landscape paints itself, pushing palette through skin to the surface, strata of siltstone, sandstone, gypsum, quartz; weather-mapped, every contour of the rock is a history of breath. Metamorphosis, is. The mist lowers, the palette contracts. 

The woman saw the blanched bones in the dust. Picked up a spine and a skull because there were no flowers. Raised a scalloped pelvis like a fertility prayer, and through it saw the sky – saw a painting. 

The mountain watched: its eyes were its shape. Summit flat as a tabletop, as an obsidian mirror. My mountain, said the woman, and she held up the bones like a viewfinder frame. If I paint it enough, God will give it to me. She painted the mountain sharp, hard edged, as she had painted the barns she had seen in the north and the skyscrapers that sliced through the city. Painted the mountain on knife edge, she said, like the Navajo who cut for flint arrow heads. Sharp as the distinction between life and life. Because, no grain stores here, no steel-frame structures, no going back. 

But of the place they called the painted desert, there was nothing to paint – it had happened, was happening, in formations Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic – coarse-grained ochre, alluvial lavender, calcite white. Nothing left for the artist to make – why put legs on a snake, why add a rib to a spine. The only way in was to work your way out – to reach the root of what is seen, and to follow that root to pull new shapes from the head, shapes no one had told you were there. 

It was a matter of time; a question of waiting.

*

She waited in the place called Ghost Ranch. No ghost, she said. I guess the ghost never showed through to me. 

Before the woman came, what was Ghost Ranch was not. A century earlier, not a 21,000 acre ranch shaped by papers and property rights, but an uninhabited area of the Piedra Lumbre Basin, Valley of the Shining Stone, where the Colorado Plateau meets the Rio Grande Rift. The land was part of Mexico, then, before the war which forced the border south and west, generating states and naming them united. 

The border was re-drawn in 1848, but the valley remained much the same – sediment gathered, the rocks stretched and sighed. The Hispanos and indigenous peoples continued to graze their livestock on the land, though the area was considered too inhospitable to settle. Then, in the 1880s, reports of strange sounds, macabre tales – sightings of effigies in trees, bodies which emerged from the earth, a monstrous serpent, whole herds of cattle vanished thin between the rocks. The land acquired the name Rancho de los Brujos, Ranch of the Witches, as though topography had converted to mythic terms. A narrative of supernatural violence conjured to match the visible scarring of the landscape: a narrative of erosion, compression, flash-floods, sandstorms, earthquakes, volcanic activity, gravity. 

The witches, as it happened, were the creation of two cattle rustlers, brothers, the Archuletas. If anyone had dared to cross the cursed landscape, they might have discovered the brothers’ secret – a canyon, where hundreds of stolen cows were corralled between walls of echoing stone. The witches were rumours, as insubstantial as the effigies designed to spook passing travellers. And yet, their presence still holds sway. When one brother killed the other over a case of hidden gold, the murdered man’s wife and daughter escaped to the nearest village. That night, a group of men followed the directions the women had given them – the remaining brother was killed and his body strung to a cottonwood tree. The men left quickly, the witches still watched. The gold was never found. 

A descendent of the Archuletas later filed for ownership of the land where the brothers had lived. The deeds to the ranch – which, strictly speaking, belonged to Los Brujos – passed through many hands, until they were won by white man who played high-stakes card games. The year was 1928, when everything seemed ripe for profit. The man’s wife had an idea – she would transform the land into a ranching retreat for well-heeled families. The cacophonous name, Rancho de los Brujos, wouldn’t do. And so, softened to a singular ghost who no one remembers seeing. And no one found the gold. 

In 1934, an artist came from the north, and rented a small house on the ranch. Not a ghost but a wife without a husband, not charming but striking, with a masculine nose and heavy lidded eyes. A woman too worldly to be a witch, too wild to be woman as the word demanded.

She had come from the city. In the city, the old art dealer claimed her paintings were spiritual. He laid claim to a feeling of space, like string music, clear and crisp. No such sound, now. The old man is not here, though his eyes are zoned in countless photographs, images waiting to be reproduced and reproduced and reproduced into iconicity. The woman with the thin lips and the wide brimmed hat. The woman whose face would launch a thousand lines, photographers following her to the desert so she would meet them at the gate and say – ah, so you’ve come to see the O’Keeffe – a name set apart from herself like a shadow from an urn. And she would laugh and turn her back, and the camera would turn back to the landscape. 

*

Alone, at dawn, when the light brought 200 million years of strata back to sight, she would stand in the doorframe of her adobe ranch house, and set out to find a painting. The places where she found frames can be re-returned to the landscape, but they are not the same. In paint, the landscape has flattened and flexed, representation has re-arranged relation, a new logic of looking replaces what is seen. The woman tricks and hides her tracks. She generates her own geology. 

The Jemez mountain range and foothills, seen from behind high trees. Translated to Black Mesa Landscape – layers of blue, purple, brash peach – depth is subverted, each layer of the image is a proscenium of folds. The trees are is compressed to a low foregrounding line – a scalar device which raises the hills to impossible heights. Spatial recession is eliminated; everything is continuous.

The chimney rock formations, eroded from a cliff of Jurassic sandstone. Translated to The Cliff Chimneys, a vertiginous crowding to the top of the picture plane, rounded in retreating and projecting masses like a cicatriced stomach vulnerable to touch. The two chimneys, projecting beyond the crop of the canvas, rigid and obscene.

A view of red siltstone hills, lined with desiccated waterways. Translated to My Red Hills, a claiming, a close-cut vision of a world without sky, brash pink and scarf-silk peach, liquid hills, owned and flowing. Points of view and times of day synthesise to fold the world inwards, a patented microcosm held out of reach.

Sometimes, the paint was dry and white. On those days the woman collected rocks – rocks like children of all good shapes. On those days she went to the white place; sandstone cliffs she could magnify and cement to the sky, cliffs the colour of old cotton shirts. Her talent, she said, was to take hold of anything she wanted. The reciprocal understanding, there enclosed by the cliffs, that to see is to know and to own.

*

In time the land changed shape, though you wouldn’t know from the looking. Expanded, contracted, water fell, froze and thawed. Visitors passed through the ranch – artists, politicians, physicists on a weekend retreat. A few miles south, someone tested a cloud making machine. The woman asked the desert whether, when the world was gone, the blue of the sky would remain. 

There wasn’t time to wait for an answer. The land was still the color of the earth, pigments you could mix with oil to make paint.

Until the clouds met at the centre of the woman’s sight. She had lost almost everything. But, if she adjusted the focus, she could see through the holes at the edges of the eye.

When the holes went away, people would read from the books on the shelves and would say what they saw. 

A road away. Loses landscape. A vertical brushstroke, shaping empty space like the old teacher told her. Where was the desert?

The mist goes monochrome. 

Breath curls through the horn and out through the eye. 

Behind the eye, the painting.