Excerpt from interview with Gretchen Giles
“I’m known as Willie ‘I don’t paint scenes’ O’Keeffe,” he declares with mock haughtiness in his regional accent. “If you want scenes, buy a Nikon.”
By “scenes” O’Keeffe means landscapes, which is odd, considering that he lives in one of the most remarkable landscapes in the world. Odder still, he has been madly painting almost nothing but landscapes, albeit those of the world at ground level, scenes most of us never see.
Based on O’Keeffe’s early training as an architect, his love of the chaotic clarity of geology, and the beauty of his home–the limestone wastes in County Clare are known as ‘the Burren’–his suitcase-sized paintings contain their own worlds, a downsizing of linear considerations and color comparable to the microclimate of the 350-square-mile Burren itself. “What this show is about is archaeology, geology, and biology,” he says.
“It’s a fragrant wasteland,” O’Keeffe continues, talking of his home. “And the Burren looks like a wasteland until you actually get very close, and the thing about it is that it’s such a minute landscape. When you actually get down on your hands and knees and get really close, it’s like Yosemite, but it’s only that big,” he says measuring small with his fingers.
“It’s the biggest Zen rock garden in the world, you know? It’s unbelievable, because you’ve got the strata on such a tiny scale. The Burren has Arctic plants and Mediterranean plants growing side by side, orchids and plants from Greenland, so I have a lot of plant paintings. They’re very strange; those are carnivorous succulents over there,” he says, pointing to an evilly squiggled pen-and-ink series. “There are,” he states with authority, “approximately 700 different plant species growing there. If you just drove through it, you’d think that nothing’s there. But if you get into the heartland of it, it’s its own universe.”
Having spent a year exploring the water-carved subterranean limestone caves of the Burren in preparation for an exhibit in 1994, O’Keeffe knows his subject above ground and below. Previous paintings have included peat and other natural materials massed into the surface of the canvases, creating topographies that beg the fingertips like a relief map. The works collected in “Coastal Labyrinth” find deeply hued blank spots cornered onto the page by O’Keeffe’s consistent use of cool-eyed lines.
“I think that people just cruise around and see only the big picture,” O’Keeffe says seriously. “They miss the little micro things, and it’s the micro things that happen. People tend to forget that, and we tramp around and destroy [those things] and the bulldozers move in and it’s not just the big field you’re destroying, you’re destroying all of this life.
“That’s where it’s happening, down there at ground level.”
