O'Keeffe's spirit still daubs pale wisps in the desert sky and bends diagonal shadows up the walls of her adobe house. And what, if not a spirit, permeates these rooms with the peace of an orderly, directed life? ``When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country," she said. She called this landscape ``the faraway."
Since her death in 1986, thousands of pilgrims, both artists and appreciators, have sought O'Keeffe's essence in the sere landscape of Abiquiu -- her subject, muse, and home -- 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe. Visitors want to see what she saw, touch what she touched, bask for a few hours in the clarity she crafted from form and space and light.
We struck out from the capital city to join the pilgrimage. After coffee in Santa Fe's bustling plaza, where jewelry vendors and burrito sellers were setting up their booths for a fiesta, we were glad to see the city vanishing in the rear-view mirror.
Heading west toward Espanola, we crossed the Rio Grande and watched the scenery grow hillier, with outcrops of rock and cone-shaped mountains edging closer to the road. Geology revealed itself in striking layers. Cliffs striped in terra cotta, buff, and gray were capped with marine sediment from a sea that covered the area in the middle Jurassic period. Mesas rose against the sky like distant altars.
These were among the sights that thrilled O'Keeffe when she first traveled to the region in 1917 on a trip with her sister. (O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wis., in 1887, moved to Virginia in 1903, to Chicago to study art in 1905, and to New York to do the same in 1907. For the next 11 years, she led a somewhat itinerant life of study and work.) In 1918, she moved to New York , where she continued to pursue her art, and married Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and gallery owner, in 1924. It wasn't until 1929 that she made it back to New Mexico, this time to Taos, as a guest of friends.
