The Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keeffe and the New Mexico Landscape

The Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keeffe and the New Mexico Landscape is the title of a a video piece created by composer and multimedia artist Nell Shaw Cohen.  

This piece features a chamber music score and footage of the New Mexico landscapes where painter O'Keeffe found inspiration.

Nell left a comment on Georgia O'Keeffe's landscapes of northern New Mexicoto tell me about it.

I took a look and was entranced.  Now I appreciate much better why it was that Georgia O'Keeffe made this part of northern New Mexico her home for so many years.  How could one fail to be stimulated by that landscape?

What was also surprising was to learn about O'Keeffe's relationship to music - and all the various places where Nell went to film the landscape for the video.  You can read and see all about this in the blog which she created as a record of the making of this film - Nell Shaw Cohen Composer.

Here are the links to the posts about specific places and landscape

• Day 1: Denver to Taos; the road to the D.H. Lawrence Ranch; San Francisco de Asis Church
• Day 2: “Abstraction” at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum; arrival at Ghost Ranch
• Day 3: Ghost Ranch and vicinity; the White Place
• Day 4: Tour of O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu home; 1977 documentary
• Day 5 & 6: Return to the White Place; Pedernal with storm clouds; a break in Santa Fe; more at Ghost Ranch
• Day 7: Last day of filming; the Black Place

Here's Nell on the topic of her film.

"The Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keeffe and the New Mexico Landscape" was funded in part by an Entrepreneurial Grant from New England Conservatory's Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department. The score, which was inspired by the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, was composed prior to the conception of this video. I filmed on location in New Mexico in June 2010, and edited and animated the video over the summer. The video received its premiere screening, with a live ensemble performing the music, in November 2010. I am seeking additional screenings (with live performances or pre-recorded score) and gallery installations for this piece.

I believe that painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887--1986) achieved an important artistic ideal: to create new meanings, previously unrealized connections, and heightened ways of perceiving the world and filtering experience. I seek to do the same with "The Faraway Nearby": to offer new insight, new ways of experiencing the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, and her source material -- to bring you into her world as I imagine it.

"The Faraway Nearby" is about seeing. When I look at O'Keeffe's paintings of New Mexico, I am reminded of that remarkable landscape in a way that feels almost more immediate and more meaningful than the reality. I see the abstract shapes, colors, and compositional ideas that informed her interpretation of the visual world around her. I see the relationship to place that was immensely important to her, which she forged while hiking for endless hours through desert badlands. This piece is my attempt to create an immersive visual and musical experience that captures these qualities.