Hey hey USA - 26th October - the landscape tour of Ghost Ranch


Ghost Ranch, as  I said in the last blog, was once a dude ranch, but is now owned by the Presbyterian Church and used as a retreat and workshop space. It covers many acres but the Welcome Centre is surrounded by small cottages where guests stay. As far as I know it is not overtly 'religious'. We had a quick look round the centre which lies in a bowl of hills with stunning views all the way round.






There is also a museum of palaeontology as there have been a number of important digs at the ranch.




The bones (not old) have probably been used in a workshop as O'Keeffe featured bones in some of her paintings.


After lunch we had been booked in for the 'Landscape Tour'. We were taken in a minibus to see the places in Ghost Ranch that O'Keeffe used to paint. O'Keefe would paint the same views over and over again with different interpretations. The tour guide was excellent and provided us with lots of information on O'Keeffe and her compositions. There was a dead tree that she painted and amazingly it still stands.



Here are some of the landscapes she painted which are very close to her house at Ghost Ranch












Cerro Pedernal which O'Keeffe said was her mountain. Her ashes were scattered at the top of it. It was so blue on the day.


O'Keeffe liked to cut off the tops from things to give more emphasis to the whole of the work and also to diminish the amount of sky in the picture




Finally a picture of O'Keeffe's house. It is owned by the O'Keeffe Museum but the public cannot go into it at present. O'Keeffe used to live here during the summer months and in New York in the winter.  She then bought a house in Abiquiu itself and, after Stieglitz her husband died, she stopped going to New York and split her time between the two New Mexico dwellings. Going on this tour allowed us to see some things, distant from the main centre of Ghost Ranch, that we would not have seen, as well as add some useful insight into O'Keeffe's life and work.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ten days on Zuza to St Kilda - 11th June - we go ashore in Village Bay

Image
  We had had a good night anchored just off shore in Village Bay on Hirta,  St Kilda's main island. When we woke up the sky was clear and the visibility good and I felt very proud of being able to make a panorama of the shore from the slightly rolling boat. There was one other small yacht tied up in the bay. The other yacht in the bay with Stac Levenish in the background In the panorama, if you enlarge the picture, you can see the bay, the sandy shore, with the military buildings at the front of the shoreline, the old village spread out some way behind and then a jumble of walls and stones going off into the distance. However by the time we had had breakfast and got out in the dinghy to go on land a fog had descended limiting our views of the hills. It seemed good though to explore in the conditions that must prevail on St Kilda most of the time! As we climbed the jetty I noticed some kelp in the water that looked just like a fish skeleton. St Kilda had been inhabited by man since
Read more

Ten days on Zuza to St Kilda - 8th June - we go aboard in Oban

Image
  We have never booked a holiday a year in advance before so the anticipation leading up to our sea trip on yacht Zuza was immense. We had arrived in Oban the night before and at the appointed hour (2.00pm) we wheeled all our luggage, far too much with cameras, a laptop, walking boots and Alan's, new to him, yachting trousers and jacket recently purchased from eBay, down the jetty and onto the boat. The good ship Zuza is a Bermudan cutter rig ship built in 1998 as an expedition boat for the Royal Geographical Society. She is 22m long and weighs a  goodly 42 tonnes. When we were on her there were 3 crew and 8 guests who occupied two twin bunk cabins and two double en suite ones. I was too late to get a double cabin so we were in a twin. With a saloon and a covered wheel house she was perfect to take us all the way to St Kilda and then around some of the Hebrides. Bear with me while I introduce everyone. Neil was the Captain, Erin the First Mate, and Grosia the chef. Neil was very la
Read more

A weekend in the Dingle, a damp drive and exciting lichen

Image
We woke to a drizzle the day after our 'Tom Crean experience'. We had not enlisted for the Tom Crean 19 mile endurance walk, and luckily that was sold out anyway, and given the weather would not have been pleasant by any yardstick. Instead we did what any old codger would do under the circumstances and go for a drive. The Slea Head Drive to be more precise and part of what the Dingle tourist board call the 'Wild Atlantic Way'. Wet and wild that particular Saturday. It is manners to drive clockwise around this circular route as the road is very narrow and cars coming the other way, as a couple did, cause all the traffic to snarl up. We started in Dingle where we stopped briefly by the harbour, before continuing until we shortly came to a museum. It was a private, commercial sort of venture, run by an American and called the Celtic and Prehistory Museum. And it was actually very interesting, containing some animal skeletons and stone axes and other such artefacts. Th
Read more

Ten days on Zuza to St Kilda - 10th June - Lochmaddy to St Kilda

Image
It was going to be another long day's sail to get to St Kilda. Neil, probably not wanting to get us up too early again, made a 7.00am start. As we're going to be crossing more open water and as I am not a particularly good sailor I did take drugs that morning. They didn't quite work but staved off the worst. The only problem was the side effect of sleepiness and, while we were motoring along, various bodies could be seen lying on the deck snoozing in the sunshine. We had a stowaway on board who stayed with us for a while. Caroline and Grosia attempted to feed him, which he appreciated. We turned west into the Sound of Harris which was an almost mystical channel in the soft light. We saw more dolphin which I ignominiously failed to photograph. There were some cormorants on a rocky outcrop and a strange buoy which was being swept by the current. Once we were clear of the channel and heading west I was excited to see that the chart told me we were in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Read more