“Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words,” says the painter Georgia O”Keeffe. “The meaning of a word is not as exact as the meaning of a color.” Unschooled in painting, and combative, I hear a not-so-little voice say, “That’s absurd!”

            I have watched the colors of a sunrise and been awed. I know what paintings I like without “understanding” them, and though some music enthralls me, I couldn’t explain why. Yet, I can read Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories and marvel at his handling of words, their definite statements, their exact meanings, meanings that are as applicable to human nature today as they were when he wrote them. I find the same true when I read such poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay or Emily Dickenson.

            What could Georgia O’Keeffe mean: “The meaning of a word is not as exact as the meaning of a color”? Often we hear people say, “Music says it for me” or they ascribe moods or feelings to various colors; but when they say and do such things, their meanings are vague and suggest rather an inability to really understand or express those particular meanings they refer to. Exact meanings? Definite statements? No!

            Of course, it is equally frustrating, I’m sure, for those who do not find what I find in Shakespeare or the poets, and I can be of little real help. All I can do for them to elaborate is to have them reread the passage or the poem, for it cannot be paraphrased and have the same exact meaning.

            So where do we go from here” How can I understand what Georgia O’Keeffe means She has kept her silence and let her paintings speak for themselves. They cannot be paraphrased, and I credit her for that. Like any true artist, she insists, “Where I was born and when and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.” And, of course, as far as she is concerned, what she has done with where she has been is the “definite statement,” the “exact meaning” of her painting.

            If we took a painting, a piece of music, and a poem on the same subject and tried to read the meaning of each, we would find, perhaps, that the cumulative effect of the music, the painting, and the poem all communicate primary or universal qualities of human nature. Perhaps we must conclude that the composer, the painter, and the poet are simply working in different languages toward the same end. That’s why Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter, can so blithely aver what she does and why I can so blithely rebel.

            And so we go the circle. I could paraphrase Byron to discredit her: “Feeling, in an artist, is the source of others’ feeling; but they are such liars, and take all colors – like the hands of dyers.” But that applies equally to writing as to painting. Perhaps Mencken: “Art has nothing to do with the intellect: it is, in fact, a violent and irreconcilable enemy to the intellect.” But that applies equally to both also.

            Perhaps I have to take it on faith that the painter feels what she is talking about and assume that what Wordsworth said about poetry also is true of painting: “The principal object proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them throughout as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and … above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them … the primary laws of our nature.”

            But I am not ready yet to let it go at that; I still hear that no-so-little voice saying, “That’s absurd!”

                  Bill Reynolds