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Red Tree, Yellow Sky by Georgia O'Keeffe
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There's an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston (organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and now making its way around the country) that brings together a great number of works by Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, two artists I'm pretty familiar with but whom it would never have occurred to me before to connect. As it turns out, the curators found some rather striking parallels in their lives and work, one of which is pleasingly highlighted by the exhibition catalog (a Moore sculpture shot against a blue background on the front cover nearly recreates an O'Keefe on the back).
O'Keeffe and Moore weren't just fascinated by a lot of the same things as each other, though; they were fascinated by a bunch of things that tend to preoccupy folks in our 21st-century indie RPG world: skulls, ancient ruins, desolate landscapes, megaliths, spooky holes, weird little guys. They both had a sense of, and an eye for, the fantastic, and ways of turning mundane things into exotic or alien ones—blowing delicate little bird bones up to a thousand times their natural size and casting them in solid metal, or carving them from a tree trunk; transforming a snail shell into a mountain or a knot in wood into a mysterious portal.
All of which means that a trip to the art museum ends up being pretty good campaign inspo. Inscrutable artifacts, alien landscapes, strange creatures, wondrous magics—it's all here.
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Elephant Skull by Henry Moore
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Egg Form: Pebbles by Moore
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Head of UNESCO Reclining Figure by Moore
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Maquette for Atom Piece by Moore
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Pond in the Woods by O'Keeffe
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Leaf Motif, No. 2 by O'Keeffe
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| Black Place I by O'Keeffe |
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Red Hill and White Shell by O'Keeffe
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