Route 66, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Creative Intuition

Last month, my family and I traveled along the western part of Route 66 for Spring Break. One of the gifts of our trip was how it re-energized me and my creativity.

Sometimes stepping away from routine creates space for new ideas to emerge. For me, one of those moments happened while visiting the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.

I have admired Georgia O’Keeffe’s work for years, but I realized during the visit that I didn’t actually know much about her life or how she thought about her paintings. One part that especially surprised me was learning how strongly she rejected the sexual interpretations that became attached to her flower paintings.

Like many people, I had always assumed the enlarged flowers were intentionally symbolic; that they acted as an invitation to think about femininity or sexuality.

But O’Keeffe repeatedly denied that interpretation. She insisted she was simply painting, in detail, what she saw: shape, color, scale, light, form. When I look at those paintings, the symbolism feels obvious. I have been culturally conditioned to see it. And yet the artist herself claimed otherwise.

The experience made me think about my own work and the strange relationship between conscious intention and whatever emerges from the unconscious during the creative process.

Most of the time when I begin a painting, I genuinely do not know what the final piece will become. I may know the colors I want to explore. I may know the kinds of marks I want to make. I may have loose themes in mind, like energy, nature, movement, Reiki symbols, emotion. But I rarely enter a painting with a fully formed message or image already planned.

Years ago, I painted a sunflower commission for a friend of my mother-in-law’s. While working on it, I instinctively used deep oranges and reds in the petals, much more than I normally would have at the time. I wasn’t referencing a specific flower. I simply followed what felt right while painting.

Then about a year later, we planted giant sunflower seeds with the girls just to watch them grow. The sunflower became enormous — taller than all of us — and when we returned home from vacation that July, it had finally bloomed.

The colors were familiar and uncanny.

The flower had the same fiery orange and red variations I had painted long before seeing it in real life. I remember pulling up a photograph of the painting and comparing it side-by-side with the actual bloom because the resemblance startled me so much.

I’ve experienced similar uncanniness in other paintings too.

One early mountain painting I created in 2020 resurfaced in my mind years later while hiking in India with my mother-in-law. At the top of the trail, the ridges and layered mountain shapes reminded me so strongly of the painting that I later placed the images beside each other when I got home.

The colors were different and the details weren’t exact. But the structure and the feeling of the landscape was familiar.

I don’t fully understand how intuition works in art. Probably none of us do.

Sometimes it feels less like inventing something and more like uncovering something that was already waiting there beneath the surface.

I believe artists can consciously explain what they intended to say with a piece. I also think creative work often carries meanings that exist beyond conscious planning. The mind may direct the brush, but the unconscious is still present in the room.

Maybe that’s part of why art resonates differently with each person who encounters it.

O’Keeffe may have been painting flowers exactly as she saw them. But what emerged through her intense observation and focus carried meanings larger than intention alone.

Seeing her work in person also deepened another growing curiosity of mine: oil painting. O’Keeffe worked extensively in oils, and standing close enough to study the texture, blending, and layering of her surfaces made me want to learn the medium more seriously myself.

Somewhere along Route 66, desert landscapes, museum walls, and long hours away from normal life, I found a creative rest and reset.