A hagiographic mist blurs Georgia O'Keeffe, much like the precious clouds produced by the theater's notable fog machine, spreading a layer of mystery over me.

Certain individuals, either in life or posthumously, become entwined in myth, their humanity sacrificed to the mythic process. I suspect the reverence shrouding Ms. O'Keeffe and the worshipful tendency in myself. There is danger in selectively portraying a life, arranging events and statements to conjure an unattainable saint or icon. We are content to create the graven image, using it as a distraction from ourselves.

At this frustrated point, I came upon a photograph of what I thought was Georgia O'Keeffe holding before her face and black mandarin-collared shirt, between those famous hands, a scissored run of paperdolls, and grinning at all us worshippers. Well, I looked directly and no, she was not smiling but enigmatic, androgynous, a dry length of spinal column between her hands like parched, oversimple lace. I took this mis-sight on my part as a cue. This woman, what I knew of her, had culled from her life, from those bright and dull things netted from a fluid existence, surely, I hoped, beneath the arid self-reliance, heroic independence, and artistic genius, lay humor, levity, some wit gone to giddiness.

I read how she and her sister walked at twilight across the frypanflat Texas plains, tossing bottles at the sky and shooting them down, exploding thick glass with bullets. I liked her for that. She painted in a shack up at Lake George, in the nude, and screamed at inquisitive children when they came, rather naturally, to spy on her. I liked that. She purchased a car in New Mexico and taught herself-recklessly, perilously inexpert-to drive. I liked that as well. She cultivated gardens,

sewed clothing, wanted a child, endured losses and defeats, once threw a charred turkey out and fled Thanksgiving guests, once interred a despised marble bust in the Stieglitz Garden. She proved retrievable, as vulnerable, silly and grieving as any of us.

There is a reason to desanctify this woman. We burden someone with mystique in part to evade ourselves—not so much to honor them but to subtly devalue ourselves. Those who paint their life's canvas exuberantly, more than the hesitant brushstrokes of the rest of us, say something alarming about our lives. This near deification of an extraordinary artist like Georgia O'Keeffe, the creeping worship that insidiously enters our innocent study and regard of her, comes from a reluctance to confront ourselves and an unwillingness to have faith in our own potential. The more we elevate her, the less we need to ask of ourselves. We hypnotize ourselves with her accomplishment, diminishing any need for our own, seeking intimidation to remain in a familiar, albeit uncomfortable, state of perpetual self-disappointment—the dark side of admiration.

Humor acknowledges contradiction, and Georgia O'Keeffe was an artist of uncommon and cultivated paradox. Her chosen elusiveness provoked diverse interpretations and flurries of theory. Her renunciative stance reflected a profound engagement with the world as she went beyond prescribed female territory, confronting its symbols head-on. The flower, so archetypically feminine, delicate, pale, passive, fragrant, and fragile, she painted as fleshy, strong, vibrant, voluptuous, and nearly voracious. She set the white pelvis against the red female humps of the hill, turning the body of the world, of ourselves, inside out.

Georgia O'Keeffe, a visionary exile, turned away from the world's quotidian gnawings and concerns. Many of us stay busy inventing reasons not to create, complaining and whining, unwilling to work out of fear. She was impatient with this; you do not wait for the perfect setting and mood to be artistic—you seize a breath, lay guiltless and unequivocal claim to the hard, finite space, the aloneness. You pioneer the unknown, the edge of life's friction and beyond, the cusp between sky and earth, the brink where humble and sacred touch. Not without loss, she sacrificed much of what we consider human paths to fulfillment—love, traditional marriage, motherhood—and went on to invent her own universe, disturbing us with her potent, altered version of reality, giving us glorious, crucial leave to do the same. Yet, we prove the greatest obstacle to ourselves.

If human life is about loss—the procession of growth, acquisition, and accumulation, the relinquishment of childhood, of naive faith, of youthful health, of perfect love, of perfect children—then, for my own selfish purposes, I demystify Georgia O'Keeffe. I will not place her out of reach; I will crank down the pedestal, touch the statue, and find that she is a woman who could behave noxiously, act arrogantly, and outrageously at close mortal range. She was no oracle into whose hands we should cast our self-declared puny lives. She broke the scale within which most of us restrict ourselves, not without fear but without fear stopping her. She confronted the profound relation between luminous spirit and humble form, shaping mortality into graven forms and colors suggestive of the infinite. She confronted sexuality, death, and loss, transmuting and transcending them. She was spartan, aesthetic, stringent, voluptuous, monastic, sensuous—an inspiration from afar, recalcitrant in person. Refusing definition, rejecting all theory, and confounding any attempt to pin her down, she eludes us even now, like water, like sand. She made holy the simple. "The vision ahead may seem a bit bleak, but my feeling about life is a curious kind of triumphant feeling—seeing it bleak, knowing it is so, and walking into it fearlessly because one has no choice—enjoying one's consciousness."

Rather than idolize Georgia O'Keeffe, making of her some reliquary for deceptive speculation, we would do well, I suggest, to return to ourselves, strengthened by her example, and get on with it: Life. The business of loss. Love.