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"So I said to myself, I'll paint what I see, what the flower is to me. But I'll paint it big, and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers. . . .

"Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw, and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower. And I don't." - Georgia O'Keeffe

On Nov. 15, Georgia O'Keeffe, born in 1887, would have been 119.

She lived a full, unconventional life as an artist, a wife, a Bohemian, a New Yorker and a New Mexican. She died on March 6, 1986, at age 98.

"Bohemian" can refer to any person who lives an unconventional artistic life, where self-expression through an art form is the highest value and main focus.

O'Keeffe expressed herself through several visual styles and themes. Her sensuous abstracts, such as "Music - Pink and Blue," provide an insight into how she saw and painted landscapes such as "Pedernal" and juxtaposition pieces such as "Pelvis with the Distance." And, of course, there were the big flowers: "Sunflower" "Petunia" and "Poppy."

O'Keeffe's body of work is a conversation in 20th-century American art between representation and abstraction. She transformed the ordinary into something mysterious.

This column is not a critique of O'Keeffe's art or a commentary on her fabulously rich Bohemian life. It's a personal and jealous observation of the deliberate pace and attention to detail conveyed through the letters written in 1916 between O'Keeffe and her friend, Anita Pollitzer, and Alfred Stieglitz, her eventual husband, describing the events of the day, the emotions of the moment and the energetic, passionate connections intellects make in life.

I heard some of these letters read by actress Marsha Mason and others last Wednesday, during a champagne celebration of O'Keeffe's birthday.

The venue was the Senate chamber of the state capitol. It was the first time in 11 years that I have ever seen members of the public allowed to sit in the leather chairs belonging to the elected tenants of the Senate.

The letters were intimately surreal - snapshots of seconds in a moment of life long gone.

In this age of constricting e-mails, sterile text messages and compressed communications, what a pleasure it was to sit and drink in the detailed, lovely, on-paper banter between friends and a future lover. What vivid, daily description. What emotion. What meticulous perfection and enunciation of one's inner voice.

Georgia found her final spot in northern New Mexico. The paths she walked near Ghost Ranch are still there. Her homes, art, letters and mystique are here for us to embrace. She is forever ours.