The GBs NFTs: Hidden Stories: GB#591
Unpacking the story of GB #591: Her first evolution
Hidden Reference #1
Hey! While making the GBs, I immersed myself in a lot of art, design, and biographies. One such biography is Portrait of an Artist: A biography of Georgia O’Keefe by Laurie Lisle. I’ve always found O’Keefe captivating as much for her rebellious spirit as her art. So here we have a Georgia O’Keefe reference. Everyone knows her flowers, but she also made a lot of cow skulls. Her skulls were often misunderstood by critics at the time to be symbols ‘about death’ but they were not. For O’Keefe, they were actually about capturing a sense of place (the southwestern United States, where I’m also from) and about the shape and form of them.
Some GBs, like this one, have both sides (a full dose of spirit of the Southwest), and some just have one side (half dose of spirit of the Southwest), minus the tacos of course!
I also like that shape as a mask. It evokes a lot of feeling and place for me. Oh and I forgot the most important part: The skulls-as-mask looks friggin’ badass.
Hidden Reference #2
Her earrings riff on a very famous painting. They are pearl earrings ‘made’ of light. This is a nod to the famous Girl with the pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer in 1665. Notice the original earring is painted nearly as if it is light — not easy to do with oils — with minimal details.
There are a few things I like about this painting and wanted to reference in The GB Project. The first point is that Vermeer painted ordinary people, often women, living their daily lives, pouring milk, reading letters, doing chores, or learning.
The second point is that Vermeer was a very technical artist focused on light, and who cared about quality over quantity. He only made 36 known paintings in his life. This painting is all about capturing and portraying light — if you look closely, much of the earring is not even ‘painted’. The intentional darkness plays a role in the light.
The third point is that art historians describe this painting as not intended to portray an actual person. The woman is meant to be an imaginary woman, a generic ‘character’ (or tronie in Dutch). A lot of NFT projects are like that. However, I tend to agree with Tracy Chevalier, who wrote an entire book about this painting called Girl With a Pearl Earring: A novel. She believes this painting is about the relationship between the woman depicted, the painter, and us, the viewers, and this is why it has become iconic. I want The GBs, in their humble little way, to be more than characters. They are also meant to be relationships.
Lastly, and notably for Vermeer, she is not depicted doing chores or shyly avoiding the viewer. Who wants to be painted doing chores? She is a regular person portrayed with dignity. Her gaze is strong. She is going somewhere.
Hidden Reference #3
She has two ocean references: the ocean bra top, and the ocean wings. The wings are still folded inside her body in the neck area.
There are other ocean references in the collection. They refer to a poem by a husband (Michael DuBois) and wife (Larissa DuBois) team (as a couple, they go by ‘Dream of the Woods’). The poem is called ‘Because I am a Mermaid’ and written by Michael DuBois. They live by the ocean in Massachusetts, where Nathan (my partner, who is also on the GB Team) and I like to go sometimes. They do not have twitter from what I can tell. But this is their instagram.
Hidden Reference #4
The wings have an additional reference that I’ll skip for this one, but have talked about on our discord.
Hidden Reference #5
There is a spiral in the upper right corner. By now you have probably picked up that I love art that is psychological in some way, and love learning about female artists.
Hilma af Klint was a big discovery for me. She was not well known in her life. She just focused and made tons of art. Yessss! She was a big thinker, very interested in science and big questions of life and the afterlife.
She was an undersung pioneer. I like underdogs, and used to paint portraits of them. Anyway, Kandinsky is generally credited as being the pioneer of abstract art. But, even today, many people do not realize that Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) did it first.
When Wassily Kandinsky wrote to his New York gallerist Jerome Neumann in December 1935, he was clearly anxious to reassure him once again that he had painted his first abstract picture in 1911: ‘Indeed, it’s the world’s first ever abstract picture, because back then not one single painter was painting in an abstract style. A “historic painting”, in other words.’ Sadly, this historic painting was thought lost. The artist neglected to take it with him when he left Russia in 1921 for Germany, before later moving to France. He knew the art world was engaged in a contest. To be acknowledged as having produced the first abstract painting had become a highly coveted prize. Which modern artist could claim that prize was still being fought over. The other leading candidates were František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. What Kandinsky did not know is that a Swedish painter by the name of Hilma af Klint had created her first abstract painting in her Stockholm studio in 1906, five years before him. What’s more, she had taken the same path towards abstraction. Without knowing of each other’s existence, the two artists seem to have travelled for a long way like two trains on the same tracks. Klint arrived before Kandinsky. Source
This spiral is a reference to her, a female artist far ahead of her time who is only recently getting serious recognition eg by the Guggenheim in 2019. Her collection The 10 Largest inspired me to think much bigger about the GB Project, how we are all evolving, and all connected. Hilma was so visionary that she designed the plans for a spiral gallery to exhibit her work.
Af Klint’s work is full of symbols, one of which is the spiral, which for her means ‘development or evolution’, a major theme throughout the GB Project.
Hidden Reference #6
I’m going to stop there and let you all chatter in the discord about the hair :).
Bye for now,
G Bae
