I’d seen clean sun-bleached skulls of cows and steers at auction, so I was not surprised to find some laid out on a table at this auction house. What surprised me were the plastic cartons of dusty and worn animal heads, bones, horns and antlers.
Unless you were a taxidermy patching up a skeleton, what in the heck would you do with them, I wondered.
I suppose you could decorate with them, using them in ways they weren’t meant to be used for, repurposing them into something unique and – maybe – lovely. A way of dressing them up by tucking flowers in the holes, painting them in various colors, or keeping them as they are – with a bit of cleaning.
None of those, however, could compare with what artist Georgia O’Keeffe did with them. She produced a series of oil paintings of animal skulls, some adorned with artificial flowers. O’Keeffe first began studying bones in 1929. “That first summer I spent in New Mexico I was a little surprised that there were so few flowers. There was no rain so the flowers didn’t come. Bones were easy to find so I began collecting bones … and finally decided that the thing I could do was to take with me a barrel of bones.”
She’d pick up skeletons from the desert and send some back to her New York studio. Over the next five years, the bones made their way onto her oil canvases. Metropolitan Museum noted in an essay that for O’Keeffe, the bones “symbolized the eternal beauty of the desert.”
The addition of the flowers seemed to have been by happenstance. She was carrying a pink fabric flower as she walked to answer the door of her home when she thought better of it. “As I went to answer the door, I stuck a pink rose in the eye socket of a horse’s skull. And when I came back the rose looked pretty fine, so I thought I would just go with that.”
That presumably became “Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1930).” Other paintings included “Horse’s Skull on Blue (1930),” “Ram’s Head with Hollyhock (1935),” “Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1931)” and “Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931).”
Okeeffe explained her fascination with skulls, which became her signature works:
“To me they are beautiful as anything I know,” she stated in a 1939 exhibition in New York. “To me they are strangely more living than animals walking around. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable and knows no kindness with all its beauty.”
The skulls and bone parts at auction seemed to be the castoffs of someone’s project, and where else to dump them than at an auction. That’s where you’ll find the darndest stuff and people willing to pay for it. I’ve written about steer skulls and other parts before – in their original form, as the arms and legs of first one chair and then another – because they do come up at auction.
Since most of us are not as talented as O’Keeffe, we’d have to find more mundane ways to use skulls and bone parts. How would you repurpose them?
