{"id":17,"date":"2010-06-08T20:00:33","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T20:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/?p=17"},"modified":"2010-06-14T18:20:08","modified_gmt":"2010-06-14T18:20:08","slug":"day-7-last-day-of-filming-the-black-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/day-7-last-day-of-filming-the-black-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 7: Last day of filming; the Black Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I began researching locations to film in New Mexico for my Georgia O’Keeffe video project, I’ve been both excited and a little nervous about the Black Place. Georgia O’Keeffe’s series of paintings on this subject (e.g. Black Place II<\/a> and Grey Hills<\/a>) are among my favorite works of hers. While composing O’Keeffe-inspired music (see this post<\/a> for info), I often felt most drawn to relate my music to the Black Place paintings. I’m fascinated by the sense of infinite movement\u00a0in her vision of these enigmatic hills.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Black Place<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was nervous about filming because the location is relatively remote and seemed like it would be difficult to find. Add to that the fact that it’s supposedly \u201coven-like\u201d\u009d in the summer (the grey-black dirt absorbs and multiplies the sun’s heat), and we were experiencing an uncharacteristic heat wave in the southwest.<\/p>\n

But thanks to this website<\/a> (and thanks to Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, for directing me to that website), we were able to navigate through surprisingly verdant mountains, valleys and ranches to the exact place where O’Keeffe painted (about a 1 1\/2 hour drive from Abiquiu). We made an effort to arrive late in the afternoon, when the day’s heat was on the wane.<\/p>\n

\"Filming
O'Keeffe said the Black Place was like "a mile of elephants".<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It turns out that the Black Place is located directly on a four-lane highway (which it definitely was not when O’Keeffe painted it in the ’30s and ’40s!). This was both convenient and problematic: convenient because we didn’t need to hike the tripod and camera very far from the car, but problematic because it was difficult to get off of the road at the best spots for filming (not to mention the power lines and fences \u201d\u201c and small oil pumps! \u201d\u201c that stood in between my camera and the hills).<\/p>\n

Despite small setbacks, I think this may turn out to be the best footage of this trip \u201d\u201c and, poetically enough, the last footage. The “real” Black Place was fascinating and, more than any other location we had visited, it felt for me like walking into an O’Keeffe painting. While looking through the viewfinder of the camera at those smooth, undulating mounds of painted-looking grey-pink-white-black, I felt like I was seeing some of what she had seen.<\/p>\n

O’Keeffe said that she traveled around the world and had never found a place that was better than where she lived. This project has taken me\u00a0to those places that she considered great, and\u00a0it has given me a new depth of understanding of her experience and where her visionary artwork came from. After a week of travel and filming, the footage is in the can \u201d\u201c five hours in total (eek) \u201d\u201c and now, the most time-consuming part of the project lies ahead: editing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I began researching locations to film in New Mexico for my Georgia O’Keeffe video project, I’ve been both excited and a little nervous about the Black Place. Georgia O’Keeffe’s series of paintings on this subject (e.g. Black Place II and Grey Hills) are among my favorite works of hers. While composing O’Keeffe-inspired music (see … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Day 7: Last day of filming; the Black Place”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4,6,15],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-faraway-nearby","tag-georgia-okeeffe","tag-new-mexico","tag-the-black-place"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nellshawcohen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}