Observations placeholder
O'Keeffe, Georgia – Travelling and warmth as a means of harnessing depression
Identifier
023198
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Matt Haig - Reasons to stay alive
The great American painter Georgia O'Keeffe, like the many other artists that fit the cliche, was a life-long depressive. In 1933, at the age of forty-six, she was hospitalised following symptoms of uncontrollable crying, a seeming inability to eat or sleep, and other symptoms of depression and anxiety.
O'Keeffe's biographer Roxana Robinson says that the hospital stay did little for her. What worked instead was travel. She went to Bermuda and Lake George in New York and Maine and Hawaii. 'Warmth, languor, and solitude were just what Georgia needed,' wrote Robinson.