BOOK REVIEW : Writing With O’Keeffe’s Sensual Lines : THE LIGHT POSSESSED <i> by Alan Cheuse</i> , Gibbs Smith, $19.95, 325 pages

Uncompromising, virtually unaffected by artistic trends, Georgia O’Keeffe pursued a private vision of beauty, turning sun-bleached animal skulls and ephemeral plants into some of the most sensuous paintings of the century.

Alan Cheuse, author of “The Light Possessed,” a fictionalized account of her life, has used a similar sort of alchemy, beginning with the bare facts of the artist’s life, but inventing, devising and editing to produce a work at once realistic and abstract--a novel in many ways technically analogous to O’Keeffe’s way with paint and canvas.

The fundamental material is essentially unchanged. Cheuse has called his painter “Ava Boldin” and provided her with a Nebraska girlhood, a beloved older brother Robert, and a sensitive stepmother to be her first teacher.

He sends her to the Chicago Art Institute and then to a teaching post at a South Carolina school. Her early drawings are shown to “Albert Stigmar” and so impress the photographer that he not only hangs them in his avant-garde gallery “An American Place” but falls in love with the creator.

Eventually, Boldin and Stigmar marry, productively dividing their time between Manhattan and the Stigmar family’s lakeside house in upstate New York. At first temporarily, later permanently, Boldin leaves New York to spend the rest of her long life in New Mexico, drawn there by the extraordinary clarity of the desert light. Once settled in a small house near Taos, she lives and works in isolation, tended by a handyman and a devoted housekeeper.

In sections of the book named for the various way stations in the artist’s life, Cheuse attempts to penetrate the heart and mind of his remarkable protagonist, using traditional literary methods to explore the mysteries of visual art and to plumb the emotional depths of his central character.

To expedite matters, he presents an appealing young couple who pay an extended visit to the artist in her old age. The man is Michael Gillen, Stigmar’s natural son, born to a young woman who worked as a domestic for Ava Boldin and Stigmar and who comforted Albert during Ava’s long desert sojourns. Michael is a sculptor, and had been working at Bennington College when he met Amy Cross, still a student but precociously talented both as an artist and writer.

Thoroughly in love with Michael, Amy agrees to accompany Michael on the trip to New Mexico to see Ava Boldin, the almost-legendary figure at the center of his mother’s life.

Welcomed and needed by the aging painter, Amy and Michael begin to catalogue the artist’s sketches, memoirs and diaries, a project that allows the author to re-imagine Ava Boldin’s life. In the process, we hear not only from Ava herself as a child, student, painter and wife, but from her brother Robert, and from friends and loves of both sexes.

In chapters ostensibly written by Amy Cross, we look at Boldin’s career in retrospect, as perceived by a young woman in the midst of trying to find a modus vivendi of her own.

Structurally complex and intellectually ambitious, “The Light Possessed” explores the difficult terrain of an artist’s psyche, striving to find essential links between the life and the work. The process of investigation is rewarding in itself, and while it may not entirely reveal the secrets of Georgia O’Keeffe’s particular vision, Cheuse succeeds in giving us a marvelous portrait of a wholly committed, supremely gifted woman artist, a view enlarged and clarified by the fictional excursions.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills” by Ned Wynn (William Morrow).