Since (approximately) the age of 5, I have enjoyed the art of Georgia O'Keeffe. Though at first this was probably because I lived in New York City and did not see flowers outside of books, I have more recently grown to appreciate her work on a relatively mature level. During the summer of 2006, I visited the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe while at a meeting of the Mozart Society of America. With my childhood recollections to guide me, it was quite a natural response (I think) that with older eyes, I saw that her paintings spoke of much more than pretty things. I spent some time in the museum and jotted down a number of musical ideas in response to both the incredibly intricate internal dynamics of specific paintings and the vast panoply of exceedingly vivid colors O'Keeffe was particularly skilled at choosing and combining. Some time later, baroque oboist Curtis Foster asked me to write a piece for him and I thought it would be nice to use these musical ideas as the basis of a work for baroque instruments. Though the logic behind the connection between instrumentation and subject may not be entirely clear, it seemed worthy of exploration and resulted in the present offering. Each movement is based on the sketches written in response to a particular painting and is meant to express a combination of my reactions and impressions of the work. The music takes each of three paintings through an impossible inter-media transformation, resulting in what can only be described as an abstraction of the original. Since O'Keeffe herself was a fan of abstraction (as evidenced by the painting from which the first movement was derived) and an avid music lover, I felt justified in thinking that my O'Keeffe Abstractions might serve as a fitting homage to one particular childhood hero.
The work was premiered on November 27, 2007 in Auer Hall of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music by oboist Curtis Foster, violist Neesa Sunar, and theorbiste Adam Wead. The three movements, respectively, are based on the following paintings: