"Now - I let you take your time to consider what I saw, and as you took the time to truly perceive my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers onto my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see about the flower - which is not the case." Georgia O‘Keefe‘s response to the eroticized perception of her works.
I’m sorry, Georgia, but I think that too. I think that every time I see, for example, your Black Iris III, its floral allure given by nature and intensely heightened by you.
I think that today as I discover Black Iris in a scene in Handmaids Tale. And I have to laugh - your iris, of all things, this sinful iris, no less provocative than L’Origine du monde, hovers over men in Gilead (a patriarchal, Christian fundamentalist state).
But back to the image, and slowly the connection to the muse must be established.
Georgia O‘Keefe’s magnificent flower rises from the darkness - a complex, multi-layered bloom that challenges the darkness and reveals its petals, like secrets, like never-sent letters under the protection of the night.
Neither the black iris nor the muse is an ordinary appearance; both are truly an opulent symphony of contrasts, with velvety black petals (ink, dry, slightly bitter ash of the iris root) presenting themselves in the foreground like an enticing pitch-black grotto, while the inner, upright dome petals shine in rich, yet increasingly lighter opaque violet and white tones (tonka-powdered lavender, delicate upper lip fuzz of the sage leaves, vanilla milk, creamy and sensual, seasoned with bright incense). And above all hovers a pearlescent mist, a soft focus, this role in the fragrance is taken by the ambrette musk, which reconciles the earthy, slightly metallic and smoky notes of the ink with the sweet part.
And just like the image, the scent carries a certain duality within it - darkness and light, profound and sensually playful, the roughness of the ink and the smoothness of the vanilla, is this the ink to sketch what will later be worn on the skin or does this ink go directly under the skin? The exterior or the hidden? Is the iris black or white? Is this even a flower?
To see takes time.
Without art, our lives would be too serious and too dull.
But better safe than sorry 😂