‘I like not knowing why I like it,’ declared Fiona Shaw, the actress, about Georgia O’Keeffe’s extraordinary blast of colour, ‘Lake George, Coat and Red’. O’Keeffe was inspired by the lake in upstate New York but there’s no discernible lake on the canvas and no coat, although there is plenty of red. When Shaw is asked to describe the painting for us, her listeners, by Alastair Sooke, the presenter of The Way I See It, she puts her head in her hands. It’s almost like an amateur painting, Shaw concludes, and yet ‘it absolutely isn’t’.
It’s an early work from 1919 when O’Keeffe was 32. At the time she was experimenting with abstraction, testing its limits, creating a study in pure colour that bears no relation to anything you can necessarily describe. That swirl of black, leading into blue, could be the lake, or is it the coat?
In Radio 3’s big-statement series about art (produced by Paul Kobrak and Tom Alban), 30 ‘leading creative thinkers’ have been asked to choose an artwork in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and to tell us, in just 15 minutes, why they like it and, with the help of a curator or two, to explain how it came into being. Shaw, an ideal choice of guest, has such an incisive mind and powerful choice of words that O’Keeffe’s vision comes to life even though we cannot see it. It’s about something she felt at Lake George, Shaw decides, using paint instead of words. ‘It’s a response to being alive.’
On the surface The Way I See It is a really simple concept but it’s daring and dangerous because talking about art to an audience who can’t see what is holding your attention is so difficult to pull off without sounding pretentious.
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