This is how Tiger’s Milk inspired her art.
Georgia O’Keeffe was known amongst all her friends and family to be super health conscious since as far back as 1917. She had a deep interest in health foods and gardening – two things that are referenced heavily in her work.
Today, the idea of taking supplements and vitamins—or munching on seaweed and kelp or mindfully picking locally grown foods—may seem like the norm, but in 1947 it was deemed nothing short of radical.
O’Keefe was way ahead of superfood obsessed millennials, choosing to grow and eat locally sourced health foods like Tiger’s Milk (a potent smoothie full of health-giving ingredients) and wild greens like watercress, seaweed and kelp.
When she moved to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, it was essential for the land to provide for her and vice versa. O’keeffe depended on the food in her garden in order to be healthy and the food depended on her to exist, it was a total exchange of the land.
And this synchronicity between land, art and food inspired the majority of her work. From her paintings like Apple With Wild Grapes (1921) to Seaweed (1923), she saw food not as a mundane necessity of life but as a tool for everything from her work to a protector of her health.
In a new book Dinner With Georgia O’Keeffe, author Robyn Lea breaks down the recipes that shaped O’Keeffe’s diet as well as her diet’s influence on her work.
This article appeared first in amuse.