Echoes of the Unseen: Black White and Blue

Echoes of the Unseen is a conceptual homage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s  Black White and Blue , here reconstructed as a cosmic and psychological reflection on perception, duality, and the quiet collisions of the conscious and subconscious mind. While O’Keeffe’s original work was a minimalist abstraction defined by curving planes and pure color relationships, this reinterpretation stretches that geometry into an emotive surrealist narrative. It shifts the viewer from contemplation to confrontation—between clarity and confusion, body and void, self and the infinite. 

The central visual structure is a mirrored face, split but merged at the mouth, two profiles fading into each other like phases of a thought or twin souls caught in a loop. Their features are semi-erased, part glass and part wave, revealing a translucent interior where energy spirals and galaxies pulse. This repetition of identity is key to the emotional current of the image: O’Keeffe’s palette has always leaned into the elemental and eternal, and here, the feminine face becomes both vessel and universe—a sacred dome holding the paradoxes of womanhood, identity, and dissolution. 

The composition is wrapped in curved, shell-like arcs—pure shapes that reference O’Keeffe’s original visual language, yet now feel like soundwaves or shields of thought. The hard white diagonal slicing into the left third mimics the original work’s bold white division but here becomes a metaphysical blade—piercing the psyche, suggesting emergence or collapse. This is not a quiet painting, even if it moves with silence. It is an image vibrating with decisions unmade, voices unheard, moments lost in inner tides. 

The color language, as in O’Keeffe’s original, is paramount. This reinterpretation builds upon the artist’s iconic palette of deep indigo, saturated black, soft white, and layered blues—not just as visual devices but as emotional states. The blacks, especially those in the lower quadrant and behind the jawlines, create gravitational pull—symbolizing voids, secrets, and shadow truths. Black here is not absence, but pressure. It compresses emotion. It is where memory hides and where subconscious dread rests heavy. 

White enters as light and cut. It doesn’t illuminate so much as divide. It is the cold, clinical part of the psyche—the boundary, the silence, the white noise. In contrast, blue in this image is fluid and ever-transforming. It courses through the contours of the figure’s face and head like veins or water. It represents intellect, introspection, and longing. Its shades range from near-turquoise glow to royal blue darkness, allowing it to operate both as breath and depth—oxygen and ocean. Blue becomes the mood of the entire landscape: a suspended melancholy with flashes of hope. 

Throughout the upper section, cosmic imagery glows within transparent domes and blurred thresholds. Galaxies, nebulas, and planetary rings emerge in faint, dreamlike washes—suggesting the infinite potential that exists within thought. These elements speak to O’Keeffe’s lifelong interest in the elemental: sky, horizon, moon, and the unseen rhythms of nature. But here, they are internalized—not external vistas, but interior ones. The head becomes the cosmos. The cosmos becomes personal. 

In the center of the figure’s head, where the eye might exist, a circular blue light pulses outward. This is not sight—it is insight. It is intuition. The third eye rendered in the visual language of modern astronomy and sacred geometry. It suggests a spiritual technology—one that allows us to read not data, but feeling. This glowing ring functions almost like a sonar or frequency, reminding us that understanding often comes not from looking, but from sensing. 

Below the horizon line of the jaw, architectural forms—perhaps cityscapes—begin to blur and melt into shadow. These spaces suggest the fragility of constructed identity. Just as O’Keeffe carved her identity into abstraction, the buildings here bend and fade, overtaken by psychological weather. This world, both built and organic, is consumed by the internal storm of thought, becoming less about physical structure and more about emotional resonance. 

In creating  Echoes of the Unseen , I sought to echo O’Keeffe’s stark elegance and sensual abstraction, but also to dive deeper into the psychic space that her forms often hinted at. Where she gave us shapes, I’ve tried to give us specters. Where she offered stillness, I sought pulses. This piece is about the invisible things that guide us—the quiet synapses, the mirrored moments, the hidden echoes between thought and form. It is about looking inward and seeing not the self, but the constellation of selves that make us whole.