I’ve just started Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe
Dawn Tripp imagines the interior life of Georgia O’Keeffe (Source: The Boston Globe)
I didn’t want to write the story of the O’Keeffe we know, but how she became the O’Keeffe we know. I wanted to reveal how perceptions of her have been shadowed by the gendered politics she faced as a female artist in a predominantly male art world. I focused on the years she lived in New York with [Alfred] Stieglitz, because those were the years her art was recognized, when she fell in love, when she made those artistic innovations and choices that set the course of the rest of her life. It was relevant to women and artists years ago, and it’ll be relevant years from now. (Source: A novelist imagines the interior life of Georgia O’Keeffe – The Boston Globe)
Reviews of Dawn Tripp’s Georgia
Dawn Tripp’s novel, Georgia
In this masterly novel, Dawn Tripp erases the boundary between writer and character, bringing O’Keefe’s voice, essence, and vision to life. Georgia is a dazzling, brilliant work about the struggle between artist and woman, between self and the other, between love and the necessity to break free of it. The luminous sensuality of the writing glows from every page, drawing the reader into the splendor and machinations of the New York City art world between the wars, revealing both Georgia O’Keeffe and Dawn Tripp as the great artists they are. ~ B. A. Shapiro (author of The Art Forger and The Muralist)
Georgia O’Keeffe’s life became legendary even as she was living it, something she both invited and fought against. This is the fascinating tension at the heart of Dawn Tripp’s novel—a book that, like O’Keeffe’s paintings, is lush and rigorous, bold and subtle, sensual, cranky, deeply felt, and richly imagined. ~ Joan Wickersham (author of The News from Spain)
American artist Georgia O’Keeffe blazes across the pages in Tripp’s tour de force about this indomitable woman, whose life was both supported and stymied by the love of her life, photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz… [Readers] will feel the passion that infused her work and love life that emboldened her canvases.,, The relationship between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, and her metamorphosis from lover to wife to jilted partner, is poignantly drawn. Tripp has hit her stride here, bringing to life one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century with veracity, heart, and panache. (Publishers Weekly)
Masterful… The book is a lovely portrayal of an iconic artist who is independent and multidimensional. Tripp’s O’Keeffe is a woman hoping to break free of conventional definitions of art, life and gender, as well as a woman of deep passion and love. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Tripp inhabits Georgia’s psyche so deeply that the reader can practically feel the paintbrush in hand as she creates her abstract paintings.
Georgia is a uniquely American chronicle… and, in the end, a book about a talent so fierce it crushed pretty much everything in its path—a rare story of artistic triumph… Tripp expertly makes drama of two traditional themes in the O’Keeffe story—the romance with Stieglitz and the development of her art—but it’s the track about her art and his management of it and her struggle not to be dominated by him that makes her novel compelling… In most first-person novels, the character talks to you. Here, she recollects with you—in her heart as well as her head. Which is to say that Dawn Tripp writes in much the same way as O’Keeffe painted: in vivid color and subtle shade. (The Huffington Post)
As magical and provocative as O’Keeffe’s lush paintings of flowers that upended the art world in the 1920s . . . [Dawn] Tripp inhabits Georgia’s psyche so deeply that the reader can practically feel the paintbrush in hand as she creates her abstract paintings and New Mexico landscapes. . . . Evocative from the first page to the last, Tripp’s Georgia is a romantic yet realistic exploration of the sacrifices one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century made for love. (USA Today)
