The creepy story behind the ranch Georgia O’Keeffe lived on
Georgia O’Keeffe, the ‘Mother of Modernism’, is most famous for her flower paintings, which many have said explore femininity, as is evident in their vulva-looking shapes. What she is less known for is her obsession with the red, gruelling deserts of New Mexico and its wildlife. In fact, for the second half of her 70-year-long artistic career, this is all she painted and took inspiration from.
O’Keeffe was married to famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and they lived in New York together. Although they were known in the city and abroad as an art power couple, O’Keeffe was a fairly recluse individual who gained the reputation of being rather an acquired taste.
The death of her husband became the turning point for O’Keeffe, who decided to move permanently in 1946 to New Mexico, where she had increasingly begun to spend time painting. She bought a property on Ghost Ranch, a 21,000-acre-large site near Aibuquiú, and spent summers and winters there for the next 40 years of her life. It was a place quite literally in the middle of nowhere, where the surroundings seemed more like Martian landscapes than anything else.
As barren as the land was, it nevertheless provided a rich backdrop for numerous films like Red Dawn and Wild Wild West. Additionally, it was known for its impressively high concentration of dinosaur fossils, like the Coelophysis, and animal fossils, which became the subjects of many of her later paintings.
O’Keeffe would take her crumbling Model-A Ford and drive around the landscapes until she found the spot she wanted to paint. She’d turn her seat and transform the car into a makeshift art studio, protecting herself from the blistering heat and wildlife. For O’Keeffe, the desert was “such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway'”.
During this time, she painted some of her classics, like Ram’s Head with Hollyhock and Summer Days. These paintings fuse elements from her earlier paintings, like the presence of flowers, precisionism style, and bold colours, while introducing new elements as well, like the huge amber mountainscape of the Pedernal mountain. These new elements are clear markers of her personal transition from her busy life in New York to becoming a widow and moving down south.
Being in New Mexico was O’Keeffe’s true calling: “In the evening, with the sun at your back, that high sage-covered plain looks like an ocean,” she said in an article in The New Yorker in 1973.
But there’s also a fairly creepy, uncomfortableness that seeps out of her paintings; perhaps it’s the repeated ram skull that provokes this. Ghost Ranch itself was known to have been the backdrop to some spooky stories. A pair of farming brothers, known as Archuleta, were the first inhabitants of the land in the 19th century, when they were drawn to the water resources in the area.
They set up their farm, which became a pitstop for other farmers to let their cattle drink, graze and rest. But, over time, visiting farmers began to disappear, and it was alleged that they were being killed by the Archuleta brothers and their possessions stolen. Because of this, the ranch gained the name ‘Rancho de los Brujos’ (Ranch of the Witches) and became a place people didn’t dare step foot in.
The eeriness didn’t stop here. Years later, one of the daughters of the Archuleta brothers came forward, confessing that she had seen massive humanoid creatures covered in fur, crawling out of the sand and screaming like children. She dubbed these ‘monster babies’.
However, it seems like none of this stopped O’Keeffe from settling here and creating her heavenly abode. Neither has it stopped thousands of O’Keeffe lovers from travelling thousands of miles, risking an encounter with a ‘monster baby’, to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which houses her paintings, in a pilgrimage to her.
