Following the guide to the kitchen, the group passed a skull with curling antlers hanging on an outside wall and a ram's skull sitting on a shelf -- both O'Keeffe icons. Inside the whitewashed kitchen and pantry were neat rows of preserves and dried herbs, grown in the gardens and put up by O'Keeffe's housekeeper. The kitchen windows looked out to a front garden and walled entry courtyard, and, over the walls, the red hills.
Minutes later we stood in the studio, a separate adobe building with a vast picture window. This sparsely furnished building, dominated by views of Pedernal, Black Mesa, and a pale cliff known as ``the white place," felt like the heart of O'Keeffe's world. A sheet of plywood on sawhorses carried a graceful arrangement of round stones. Aside from bookcases and another plywood surface used as a desk, the other main piece of furniture was a single bed with a white spread next to the window. This was where the artist rested when she was working.
