BY STEVE MARTINDALE
FOR SALT SPRING FILM FESTIVAL SOCIETY
The Salt Spring Film Festival joins the Salt Spring Arts Council at Mahon Hall on March 27 to present the award-winning documentary Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brightness of Light, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner.
World-famous for her sensual paintings of flowers, animal skulls and the stark beauty of her beloved New Mexico, O’Keeffe is widely revered as one of the greatest visual artists of the 20th century.
From her early struggles and artistic awakenings to her rise as a globally recognized cultural force, O’Keeffe emerged from under the shadow of her older husband, celebrated photographer and art gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, to become a feminist icon who insisted on living life on her own terms.
What many don’t know about O’Keeffe is that she painted a series of ominous cityscapes during the 1920s when she lived in New York. Among other surprises in this revelatory film is that O’Keeffe first came to public attention as the nude model in Stieglitz’s erotic photographs, which at the time were considered scandalous — and which led to Stieglitz abandoning his first wife, Emmeline Obermayer, when she came home to unexpectedly find one of their early nude photo sessions in progress and issued her husband a curt ultimatum.
Born in Wisconsin in 1887, O’Keeffe spent the last 40 years of her life in New Mexico after being widowed in 1946, until her own death in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of 98. Nearly 30 years later, one of O’Keeffe’s paintings sold for an astonishing $44.4 million USD, shattering previous records for the highest price ever paid for a painting by a female artist.
This spellbinding journey through love, loss and the radical independence that shaped O’Keeffe’s life won the Founders Award at the Virginia Film Festival. With unprecedented access to her groundbreaking body of work and over 20,000 pages of letters between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz — poignantly narrated by acclaimed American actor Claire Danes and her real-life husband, British actor Hugh Dancy — this award-winning film offers an in-depth, cinematic portrait of the artist known as the Mother of American Modernism.
This one-night-only screening takes place at Mahon Hall at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 27. Tickets are not available in advance and will be sold only at the door. Admission is by donation, with a suggested donation of $10 (although all are welcome and no one will be turned away for lack of funds).