Mix and Match

An unknown painter and school teacher, Georgia O'Keefe, met an established photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, when she was 28. Their relationship started with the two as acquaintances with an appreciation for each other's work, then mentor and pupil, then lovers, and finally married in 1924. Alfred was enamored with photography as an art form, but also, its technical boundaries. His aesthetic preference was to capture the observed moment, using weather or lighting to define a mood rather than a soft-focus lens. He was schooled as an engineer.

Georgia pursued abstraction over the representational art of her contemporaries. By 1916 her "self-expressions" used a full complement of colors to paint recognizable forms and landscapes in a new, distorted, yet elegant way.

Red Hills with Flowers by Georgia O'Keefe in 1937

Photograph of O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918

My daydream takes me to an imaginary home they might have shared in the 1920s (in reality they spent summers at a family home in Lake George). How would they blend their very different styles? Her love of color, his stark German realism. They both share an appreciation of form. Is there a common design aesthetic that melds the tastes of an engineer with an illustrator's? 

When I married an IT VP, an engineer-type, a tinkerer-- he came with a love of not just tech, but all things technology-related. The crisp polish of modern stainless steel. The faded patina and chipped amber keys of a 1918 Burrough's adding machine. Our ever-expanding storage room includes first generation Kindles, a Commodore PET computer and some very, very cool antique typewriters.

I bagan collecting the works of other artists in 1991 when I shared a studio space with my sister at the Art Center South Florida. I was the illegal graphic design firm operating in the back room of her art photography and gallery space. I love bright colors. I love pop art. I love happy. I want a painting to grab me with emotion and pull. me. in. I made a habit of trading the artists three thousand of their own, personalized, full-color business cards for a piece of their art. In a time when knowing someone who worked on a Mac was rare, I could, and did, combine commercial print runs with freebees--tacking a 2x3 business card with an art photo to the trimmed-off edge of full-color radio station promo folder or a POP (point of purchase) table card. It cost me nothing, and I amassed a collection of early South Florida artists that I cherish and would never have been able to afford.

I've moved this bubble-wrapped collection from place to place for twenty years, waiting for a time I'd have the kind of soaring ceiling height the art deserves. And so, with my husband's collection of technology, and my collection of paintings, I set out to create a Georgia O'Keefe/Alfred Steiglitz-inspired symmetry to shape the experience in the home we now share. 

Our Sanctuary living room

Coffee table with inset overhead photo of accessories 

Our living room walls are cream and soothing, colorful with abstract paintings that brighten up the grey Seattle light. Our industrial design-inspired furniture-- an acid-washed coffee table and metal aviator chairs-- display a lead-type collection and the adding machine from the 1900s. An antique typewriter rests on a tall pedestal near the replica Archo floor lamp. It all lives quietly within the original church architecture of Corinthian columns and geometric-patterned stained glass. The space reflects our own unique background and styles, and yet somehow I imagine that Georgia and Alfred would have been happy living here too.