Three on Corn, After Georgia O'Keeffe, by Sally Miles

Corn, Dark, No. 1, by Georgia O’Keeffe (USA) 1924

​Corn Dark 
 
There are three of them in all, your corn paintings. We see no ears here. No silk, no fruit. Your corn is not the plant in profile, leaves ascending a stalk and topped by tassels. Your corn’s height is in the tall narrow canvas, 32 by 12 inches wide. 
 
Of the three, this is the darkest corn. Its background, the colour of red wine. An excess of wine - I imagine spilt wine on your white tablecloth. And the leaves, they’re darker. Blade shapes of dark green, almost to black, and blue. Fluid and moving, these leaves, they’re mythic versions of themselves. 
 
In this one it is night. This is night corn, corn at dusk maybe, when we see Venus rise in the sky. From across the gallery the painting is a mass of dark flame. Because leaves are nature’s flame. And in the dark, streaks of lightening, top to bottom, like we see in the heat of summer, a flash of illumination.
 
Looking down into the corn, this is a star’s perspective, the moon’s, a bird’s – some mythic star-moonbird has come down close, hovering here while we look. It’s the O’Keeffean point of view. Eccentric, intimate. You love the plant, the way it emerges from itself, the marvel of its unfurling. You’ve cropped it inside a frame and we know it goes on, beyond the visible edge.
 
You show us the plant’s darkest place, the uncoiling of growth. A mystery: leaf after glorious leaf after leaf, after leaf, again, again and again, in ceaseless succession. How? Where does it come from? What is its source? And why is our world, when we stop to look, so mesmerizingly beautiful?

Corn, No 2, by Georgia O’Keeffe (USA) 1924

​Corn #2 
 
Your “Corn,” Georgia O’Keeffe. So sleek, so sophisticated. Your corn is a green satin dress, glamour, Fifth Avenue fashion. Tall. Slender. Sinuous. Beautiful blades, narrowing to points, piercing the lavender negative space. In the museum, in secret, my body is a temple dancer in rhythm with your moves on the canvas. That green fecundity. That burgeoning life force. Same rhythm in me, same love. You see, I too have a mad passion for the corn plant. From a small farm in Ohio, summers.  An old white house with a root cellar, a raspberry patch, and sugar pie. And me running with my cousin to the field out back. I can still see the forest of corn plants, all taller than me. Still see us bending back the blades, searching for darkened silk, snapping off ears and filling brown paper sacks for supper. And you? Was it the farm in Sun Prairie? Or out at Lake George? Lake George: Those god-awful dinners with his family! And you pushing back from the table ‘cause you just couldn’t wait to paint. I heard you wanted a child, but Mr. Stieglitz said No. I don’t know what that cost you. But, Georgia O’Keeffe, you painted the corn. We have that. And the Jimson Weed and the poppies, the barns, the apples and the pears. And your pelvic bones live on forever in the broad blue sky above the desert in New Mexico.

Corn No. III, by Georgia O’Keeffe (USA) 1924

​Corn III
 
This one’s not as tall as the other two. The same undulating movement though, the same arabesques and elongated points. The same gorgeous-ness. And a broadening. Your mythic leaf, it’s not so much about corn now—you’re playing with leaf-ness, plant-ness, natural life’s abundant and repeating effluescence. Same vantage point as the others though: a wonderfully impossible one. But then, as you said, you weren’t painting facts. You took away tassels, ears, height - all that didn’t suit your vision. These obstacles gone, we’re looking into. The way we look into a person’s face, into their eyes, to comprehend who they are. That took a long time, you said. It’s why you liked series.
                                                                                ~
I remind myself that your paintings were once shocking. At Steiglitz’s gallery they looked at your flowers and plants and saw sex, and the freakishness of a woman painter. Behold woman, she paints from the womb, some man wrote in The Dial. In your plain-spoken way, you said what they saw in your paintings wasn’t what you put there. A hundred years later, your art seems to be everywhere. (It reproduces so very well.) And so, Georgia O’Keeffe, you’ve made us see as you saw. We learned to see the small enlarged, to see sensuality exalted. To see large spaces cropped, but in their cropping, boundless. We see it now. But, back then, how did you ever keep painting in the face of it all?
                                                                                ~
I feel this painting as much as I see it. My body recognizes its rhythm. I know that unfurling. I know that movement out and away. I too am held at the center by an anchoring core. I too move from the small out into the world, into full maturity. I have new life coming while my old leaf darkens and goes back to where it came from. Back to the cloudy mystical substance you’ve painted here. You’ve caught the essence of a power I can’t name. It enters me and fills my ribcage. I confess that for me the world is animated and alive - I see spirit everywhere. I see it here. I wonder if that’s what you want me to see. 
 
Sally Miles
 
Sally Miles lives in Madison, Wisconsin, not far from the town of Sun Prairie where Georgia O’Keeffe was born. She studied linguistics, languages and language disorders, and painting and drawing. She loves interweaving writing and visual art.