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.
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