I'm getting to like you so tremendously that it sometimes scares me. having told you so much of me more than anyone else I know. Could anything else follow? But that I should want you. Now that is a love letter if I've ever heard one curious who wrote it and to whom keep listening because we've got the full story. I'm Sarah Wendell.
I'm Alisha Rai. I welcome to lovestruck daily where we bring a love story to your years every single day. I'm in love with you saying to you? I'm in love with you.
Hello there, fellow work wife. Hi, Sarah. How you doing? I'm hanging in there. It is an artistic day today. Do you? Are you feeling the creative energy?
Yeah, I love one of my favourite things. There's a place in Long Beach called brushstrokes and beverages. And Kai and I go there, at least like once a month. It's just
one of those like paint and sit places where you drink and paint thing. Yeah,
it's a patented place. And there's like a teacher who guides you through painting something so and of course we both do paint the same thing. So now we have a wall in our condo that is just to have like, six or seven. But they're, they're like bears at them. But it's cute because they're tracking our progress as we go.
I love that. But also move them around and make it like a game of memory for your guests. Like we didn't just see that picture in the bathroom. Wait, you could give people art deja vu,
we do have very different painting styles. So they do look a little bit different. And Kai has this thing where he wants to put a bird and everything. So there's
a tree happy little bird. Why not? Whether
it's a nature scene or not. I'm gonna be a bird. So okay, yeah, why not? That's a signature. It's a little bird signature.
Like if anyone deserves a signature bird. That's chi.
Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.
Well, I have something for your art wall, or potential potential thing for your art wall. I have a quiz by Angie N. Bucket Dano. Which famous painter matches your personality mess you
know, I love me a quiz.
So if we figure out who your art personality is, you can just cover your bathroom walls and let's do it. All right, first. Pick a dream home a cute little cottage, a nature lovers mountain home a luxurious villa or a trendy city loft.
I do love me a trendy city loft but you know what? I'm craving some space let's go for luxurious villa. All right.
I mean, that's gonna come with a pool and a good location. Yeah, I love a nature lovers mountain home like all those houses with big windows, but every time I see one, I'm like, how do you sleep?
You're gonna get murdered. That's when you get murdered. If I see if I get home in the woods with giant windows, I will 100% expect to be murdered. Like I love this. Like I would I would be getting stabbed. And I'd be like I knew it. Like that's absurd. Be if
anything ever captured our respective personalities. I look at all these windows and I think how are you going to sleep? There's too much sunlight. If you just need blinds everywhere and you're like nope, murder. No,
I bet you bet. Like how are you gonna sleep because the murderer is watching you.
All right. This one's a tough one. All right. dream vacation. Paris, the Yucatan Peninsula, New York City or Amsterdam.
Oh, um,
Paris. All right. Watch your step. They don't pick up their dog poop. That's what I've heard. All right. All right. Turn the dial down on your anxiety for just a moment. What's your worst trait? Oh, just like this? overbearing, pessimistic, mellow, dramatic or rigid. Oh, I'm very melodramatic. Let's go. Yeah, I would have agreed before the fire nation attacked. What element would you control?
Air? Fire. Water. I'm a water baby.
Now pick a flower boo. tough
for me.
I know. Rose, Iris Lily or marigold.
Oh, I'm gonna say marigold. I love miracle.
All right, the famous painter that matches your personality best is Vincent van Gogh.
Oh, well,
you are eccentric, creative and a little misunderstood. Aren't we all? You love everyone and everything and finding beauty in the mundane aspects of life comes as naturally as breathing to you.
Oh, that's so nice. Yeah. Do you know everything I know about Vincent van Gogh is from the Doctor Who episode
I was gonna say is the Doctor Who.
So I have I have like, I'm very, like I'm, I just find him so endearing. But also I don't know if I find him as a person endearing or the doctor who rendition of him.
You know, I read recently that he had a brother who oversaw the financial aspects of his career who took care of all of the things around his art life and died only a few years after he did and they were buried together. Oh, we should do a Van Gogh episode. I think we should
do like a I mean, a full, you know, have a full great, great artists series. Yeah.
And speaking of we have a great artists to talk about today, who incidentally, taught at the very small women's college that I went to that no one has ever heard of back in 1915.
Can't believe that when she was still pretty largely unknown, right? Yeah. Like she wasn't a famous artist when she came in. Know, how wild is that? That someone's like, great grandma's just out there. Well, I don't know if she's still out there. Talking about how she got dumped by Georgia O'Keeffe. Right, that's amazing. Can you imagine? Well, as you've guessed, today, we're going to be talking all things art and romance exploring the story of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O'Keeffe, whom you might have heard of was an American painter active through much of the 20th century famous for her gorgeous paintings of flowers, and New Mexico landscapes. Alfred Stieglitz was a photographer and a modern art promoter and their romance was legendary. Oh, tell
me everything.
So these two artistic lovebirds met in 1916 at an avant garde art gallery in Manhattan, I just assumed to all art galleries in Manhattan, I met God, but I think that's like actually a real style. Probably,
if there's like a, there's like an art gallery is like we are the Pizza Hut of art galleries.
We don't come to elicitor as Alibaba God, when so Alfred was a fully established and internationally acclaimed photographer at 52. And Georgia was still finding her artistic voice and living in obscurity at 28. Okay, so everybody's legal. That's yeah, good. You never know what these. Not much is known about the actual meeting, except that they develop a professional connection. And he takes an interest in helping her advance her work. Now, the really cool thing about this relationship is that it spurs an incredible correspondence between the two of them over the next 15 years. Yes, piling up to over 25,000 pieces of paper, some letters as long as 40 pages and batches indicating that occasionally they were writing each other two and three times a day. Like this is like text messaging to the extreme. I can't even fathom. I don't think I text chi to to.
Alicia, I don't have the stamina to write a check. I don't know I have to because schools keep asking me to write checks. And I don't have the stamina to write a check. How am I going to write a 40 page letter good habits.
An excerpt from one letter during the year in which they met written by Georgia says I'm going I'm getting to like you so tremendously, that it sometimes scares me. having told you so much of me more than anyone else I know. Could anything else follow but that I would want you? Oh, there is like a confessional aspect to this, isn't it? Oh, for sure. Yeah, sure.
It. It's almost like back in the day when email wasn't the scourge of annoyance that it is now that you would write all these long narrative email messages about what you were doing. And it was very journaling, like Yeah,
yeah, I missed that. I miss like that blog journal, you know, culture. So he had the one wrinkle, of course, and all of this is that Alfred is married when they begin their correspondence sometimes. The Georgia is undaunted by this. Okay, okay, even girl Amish showing up unexpectedly in New York when he begins exhibiting her work in his gallery.
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but I mean he is obviously unhappily married and he starts to realise that the interest is taken in Mr. O'Keefe is a bit more than professional. You don't say? Yeah. After the spontaneous visit, he writes to her how I wanted to photograph you the hands, the mouth and eyes, and the enveloped in black body, the touch of white and the throat, but I didn't want to break into your time. I mean, wow. Okay.
I appreciate the respect for her time, but my dude, my dude, yeah, my dude.
Eventually, about a year and a half after they meet Georgia moves to New York, and at this point, they're pretty good. Early I'm going to set out on a life together not just based on love, but also their work. He clears out a studio for the two of them to continue working. Six years passed before they married 1924 When he finally divorced his wife, although she pretty much had already moved in with him like the secretary arrived in New York City. Okay, I don't I don't understand like, well, divorces did take longer back then. So maybe that's a part of it. But yeah, it's their professional and personal dynamic is consistently described as incredibly intense. And while it tends to feed their respective creative work, it's also pretty time consuming and like Soul consuming. Not long after they get married, some of the cracks begin to show she is still young and wants children while he's in his 60s and well past that part of life. They also live with their in laws to sustain their work financially. And Georgia often complains that their presence and traditions infringe upon our creative time in a work which will happen when you're living with your six year old husband's parents. I imagine. Regardless, Georgia starts becoming famous, not least because of all of Alfred's promotion of her work. She starts getting restless admits the intensity of the relationship at home life and decides to take a sabbatical to New Mexico which will indelibly affect her work and their marriage. I think everybody's seen Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscapes which are gorgeous. It's an incredibly generative time for her work, she often writes to offer it about how much she's able to get done, how inspired she is by the land itself. And her work, of course, famously reflects these revelations and experiences, he's afraid she's never going to come back. And she's clearly in the great creative period of her life and cannot be pulled away from the land that made her come alive. And during this period, she writes to him, there is much life in me when it is always checked in moving towards you, I realised it would die if we could not move towards something I chose coming away, because here at least I feel good. And it makes me feel I'm growing very tall and straight inside. And very still, maybe you will not love me for it. But for me, it seems to be the best thing I can do for you. I hope this letter carries no hurt to you. It is the last thing I want to do in the world. Oh, wow. One thing I will say these people use a lot of M dashes in their writing. And I appreciate that as a fan of the M dash. Good break. I mean, is that a very nerdy thing to notice about some of these love letters, still, but two of them write to each other with that same intensity and continuity, despite the struggles that still plagued their union until his death in 1946. But throughout their entire relationship, their dynamic remains the same push pull that cannot help feed their work. She is his muse, and he is her teacher. That's really interesting.
It is an interesting story. And it's interesting to me that she wrote about that very similar experience that I see other people encounter when they can get away from the expected labour of being a partner or being a caretaker and just focus on themselves and their creation. The part where she said, I'm growing very tall and straight inside and very still.
Oh, yeah. Where she's like moving toward moving towards something.
She's she's becoming herself. Oh, that's hard. And it's interesting to see relationships where in the beginning, they accentuate each other, and they are gravitate towards each other. And then both of them grow from that. And then later those same two people could grow even farther away from each other. Yeah, it's hard to tell because you don't know who you're going to be when you grow
up. It is. And it's like, I guess it's partially your choice. But sometimes it's not. I read something
online the other day, and I wish I could cite my source right off the top of my head. But unfortunately, I can't, I will try to find a link and put it in the show notes. This person wrote that the there's this whole idea that if something that a human creates isn't permanent, then it's a failure. You were married for 10 years, and then you got divorced. That's a failed marriage, you open a business and it runs for a while. And then you decide that the profit margins are not sustainable. So you close it, it's a failed business, the idea that we assign failure to things that don't last forever, is basically wrong. Because the things that I did in my 30s don't always fit me in my 40s. And I am assuming when I hit my 50s things will be different and but just because I stopped doing something doesn't mean my experience having done it ended in failure. It just ended and that's okay. So maybe that's their relationship. It existed for a time and then it came to an end.
I still consider that like a happily ever after. Yeah, things have a lifespan sometimes and that's part of life and but it's still a happy ending.
Alicia, have you seen any of Georgia O'Keeffe's work?
Um, yeah. Yeah, I've seen prints of it. I don't know if I've seen a real Georgia O'Keeffe up close and personal.
Well, according to Oh, my goddess.org Georgia O'Keeffe didn't actually paint flowers that looked like vaginas.
Oh, yes, she did. But see, this is where those are vagina.
They're very young yeller.
I mean, I, how could they be anything but vagina?
I mean, they're not all vaginas. It's, it's, it's not all of them. But there's a suggestiveness to them. But also, I think this falls into the realm of ownership of someone else's experience with your creation. Yeah. Which is not something you as the creator can truly control or own. People are going to take out of art, or any, anything that you create, what they bring to it, and you can't anticipate and control that. So she may not have intended them to look like vaginas. But if so many people think yeah, I see. Yeah. I see some parts there. Well, okay. I, a lot of people have that in common. It may be also that, you know, people didn't have a lot of comfort saying the word vagina or even talking about it. So you know, let's be, let's be pleased. Yeah, a little bit of a little bit of
product of the time to write like, how much how many women were out there. So maybe, maybe she didn't want to say that she did it. I maybe who knows? Or maybe she didn't think she did it? Maybe it was it's just like what people see in it, which is, you know, once you create something, it's out of your hands, and it's in the hands of the viewer and the reader and the consumer. Yeah, you know all about that. Right. You are done. Yeah, I do know all about that. Yeah, once it's once it's out of my hands. It's out of my hands. So yeah, you know, whatever people interpret from that is up to them. Very interesting, though. What is your love to go for today's episode,
that regardless of the length of your relationship or your time together, that beauty is still created when people love each other? Yeah, even if it's big paintings that look like vaginas.
Yeah. I think that yeah, they definitely Oh, yeah.
Are you an evocative flower? Do you have opinions about Georgia O'Keeffe's are loved to hear that can you find the one that looks most like a Yoni and would you tell us about it? Please, you can email us at lovestruck daily at frolic dot media. You can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter at lovestruck daily, but we would love to hear from you. Our researcher is Jesse Epstein. Our editor is Jen Jacobs. We are produced by Abigail steckler and little Scorpion studios with executive producer frolic media. This is an I Heart Radio Podcast and wherever you are, we wish you a beautiful creative happily ever after today am in love with the love with you. I'm in love with you
