Santa Fe

JIMSON WEED - GEORGIA O'KEEFE

Even though we are physically parked in Santa Fe, we have not had a chance to get into Santa Fe and look around until today. The day after we arrived, we jumped into the truck and headed down to the Apple Store in Albuquerque to purchase an ipod. We ended up getting the ipod and a boze speaker/recharger for the inside of the rv, a connection for our tv to play downloaded movies or podcasts, plus a connection to the speakers of our truck for when we were traveling. We headed back to our rig, where we downloaded itunes and began transferring all of our cd's to itunes. It has taken us almost 4 days to accomplish this transfer which included moving all of my picture files off to an exterior hard drive for storage to make room for the itunes music albums. But now that we have done all of this prep work, we are ready to load the ipod. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, we did some housekeeping, laundry, and made a side trip over to Abiquiu to see Georgia O'Keefes home. They allow no photos, so you will just have to imagine the lovely gardens, most of which were planted in vegetables when she was alive. The home was a restored building in the Spanish style with split cedar ceilings and polished mud floors. The interior was spare and almost Asian in appearance and simplicity. The colors were the cocoa brown of the walls, the whitewashed color of the ceilings and black or white accents all around. She collected rocks and they were laid out in various places along with the skulls of the animals which hung from the walls, either inside or out. The house was very natural, nothing elaborate or ornate. One room was the bookroom with her collection and also Steigleitz's collection. It was not open for viewing however. Her own bedroom was very simple and attached to her studio which looked out over the Chama River Valley.

Today when we headed into Santa Fe, our first stop was the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. This is the largest single collection of her works in the world and represented her early watercolors and charcoal drawings, the paintings from her time in New York with Steigleitz, her paintings and pastels from her New Mexico period, and finally her paintings that were inspired from her many trips abroad. After we left the museum, we had some lunch and wandered around the plaza for a while looking into some of the galleries where we saw more of the paintings from the original Taos Artists and many more of the woodcuts by Gustave Baumann. A chilly, rainy, but inspiring day.