The Blue Egg

Nancy Hopkins Reily writes of viewing a painting at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu, New Mexico home on Christmas Eve, 1953. As a nineteen year old woman, Reily wondered what the painting was—an unfinished painting or a blue egg. But she realized that something important was going on in the house.

One viewing of anything can spark steps for a journey lasting a day, weeks or years. Reily takes you on her long, long journey of discovery of the painting she called “The Blue Egg.” The journey took her to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum where she met a landowner where Georgia had walked its awe inspiring landscape in Canyon, Texas; the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut; an interview with Georgia’s retired cook, Jerrie Newsom, in Jerrie’s mobile home; a visit to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert; introducing her two children to search at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; research that ended in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum gift shop with on the shelves her two books on Georgia; being asked to donate her research to the New Mexico Museum of Art, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; and the final steps of packing sixteen boxes of research to be shipped to the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library.

Through the years, Nancy’s interest in words has led to researching sixty-four lines of family genealogy before Ancentry.com, keeping a daily journal since 1976, and simply organizing research into books on many subjects. If asked, “How long did it take to write The Blue Egg,” she replies, “My age at the time.”