How Does the Geogia Okeefs Work Reflect Her Experiences in Making Art?

"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I desire to give that world to someone else."

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"I said to myself 'I accept things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me- shadows and ideas so about to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that information technology hasn't occurred to me to put them down.' I decided to showtime anew, to strip abroad what I had been taught."

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"It is easier for me to paint it than to write nigh it and I would so much rather people would look at it than read about it. I come across no reason for painting annihilation that tin be put into any other form besides."

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"Color is one of the great things in the globe that makes life worth living to me and as I have come up to call back of painting information technology is my efforts to create an equivalent with pigment color for the world, life as I run into it."

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"I have just one desire every bit a painter - that is to paint what I see, as I come across information technology, in my own way, without regard for the desires or taste of the professional dealer or the professional collector. I aspect what little success I have to this fact. I wouldn't turn out stuff for club, and I couldn't. It would stifle whatever creative ability I possess."

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"Zilch is less existent than realism. Details are confusing. Information technology is only by option, by elimination, by accent, that nosotros get at the existent pregnant of things."

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Summary of Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism and its human relationship to European avante garde movements of the early on-xx^thursday century. Producing a substantial body of work over 7 decades, she sought to capture the emotion and ability of objects through abstracting the natural earth. Alfred Stieglitz identified her equally the first female American modernist, whose paintings of flowers, barren landscapes, and close-up still lifes have go a office of the mythology and iconography of the American artistic mural.

Accomplishments

O'Keeffe incorporated the techniques of other artists and was particularly influenced by Paul Strand's utilise of cropping in his photographs; she was 1 of the kickoff artists to adapt the method to painting past rendering close-ups of uniquely American objects that were highly detailed yet abstract.
O'Keeffe did not follow any specific artistic movement, but similar Arthur Dove she experimented with abstracting motifs from nature. She worked in series, synthesizing abstraction and realism to produce works that emphasized the master forms of nature. While some of these works are highly detailed, in others, she stripped away what she considered the inessential to focus on shape and color.
Through intense observation of nature, experimentation with scale, and nuanced use of line and color, O'Keeffe'due south art remained grounded in representation even while pushing at its limits. From the 1940s through the 1960s in particular, O'Keeffe'south art was outside the mainstream every bit she was one of the few artists to adhere to representation in a period when others were exploring not-representation or had abandoned painting altogether.

Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe

Defining the early New York avant-course with Alfred Stieglitz, and meditations in vast and desolate New Mexico are some of the sites of O'Keeffe'south artistic inspirations and explorations.

Important Fine art past Georgia O'Keeffe

Progression of Fine art

1916

Blue #2

Bluish 2 is indicative of O'Keeffe's early monochromatic drawings and watercolors, which evoke the movement of nature through abstract forms. While the curvilinear form in Blue Ii is reminiscent of a establish form, O'Keeffe was playing the violin during this menstruum, and the shape likely captures the scroll-shaped end of the neck of the violin that would accept been in O'Keeffe'southward line of sight equally she played. The intense blue color suggests that she may accept been familiar with Wassily Kandinsky's notion that visual fine art, like music, should convey emotion through the use of color and line. The intense blue peradventure suggests the sound of the music and the mood it evokes or expresses.

Watercolor on paper - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

1924

Petunia No. two

Petunia No. 2, i of O'Keeffe'southward first large-scale renderings of a flower, represents the first of her exploration of a theme that would mark her career. In this painting, she magnifies the flower'due south grade to emphasize its shape and color. She stated that "nobody really sees a flower - really - information technology is so small - nosotros haven't fourth dimension - and to run into takes time... So I said to myself - I'll paint what I encounter - what the blossom is to me but I'll pigment it large and they will be surprised into taking time to expect at it." Her flower images often received interpretations that O'Keeffe disagreed with, particularly from feminist critics who saw these paintings as veiled illusions to female genitalia. For O'Keeffe, there was no hidden symbolism, just the essence of the flower. In fact, the beefcake of the petunia is incredibly detailed, and O'Keeffe may have been emphasizing the androgyny of the reproductive parts in order to counter the idea that her subject matter was connected to her gender. Though American and European artists had experimented with abstraction for at least a decade, O'Keeffe, like Dove, focused on images from nature and O'Keeffe was the only creative person to consistently use flowers as a motif.

Oil on canvass - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Atomic number 26

1927

Radiator Building - Dark, New York

This painting illustrates O'Keeffe's skill in articulating architectural structures too as her utilize of the highly realistic, yet simplified style of Precisionism. She uses the night properties to incorporate a play between structure and light, and between the directly lines of the architectural forms and the ethereal fume, which is reminiscent of the folds of flowers. O'Keeffe's portrait of the Radiator Building, an Art Deco skyscraper that was completed merely three years prior to the painting, presents an iconic image that captures the changing skyline of New York Urban center that O'Keeffe often establish claustrophobic. She depicts the building from a low vantage bespeak to convey a sense of oppression with the building'due south towering presence over the viewer. The painting can also be read as a double portrait of Steiglitz and O'Keeffe; Stieglitz is represented past the Scientific American Building, as indicated by his name in red, and O'Keeffe by the Radiator Edifice. Object portraits of this type, influenced by the verse of Gertrude Stein, were an important theme for artists of the Stieglitz Circle.

Oil on canvas - Fisk University, Nashville

1931

Moo-cow'due south Skull: Ruby, White and Blue

O'Keeffe became enamored with animal skulls later on visiting New Mexico. Through the precise rendering of the weathered skull's surface and sharp edges, O'Keeffe captures the essential nature of the skull while also referencing the transience of life. Isolated on the canvass, divorced from its desert context, O'Keeffe uses the moo-cow's skull and the reddish, white, and blue groundwork to represent both naturalism and nationalism, or the relationship betwixt the American landscape and national identity. Moreover, the bailiwick could allude to the Grit Basin and the Great Depression, thereby making an environmental and economic statement. What is articulate is that O'Keeffe has created a memento mori that elevates this relic of the New Mexico desert to the status of an American icon.

Oil on canvass - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

1949

Black Place, Grey and Pink

O'Keeffe'due south landscape paintings are like to her flower paintings in that they often capture the essence of nature every bit the artist saw it without focusing on the details. In works such as Black Identify, Grey and Pinkish, O'Keeffe emphasizes the wide open up spaces and emptiness of the landscape around her New Mexico ranch that she purchased in 1940 - vistas that are the reverse of her claustrophobic cityscapes. Her paintings of the expanse capture this sense of identify and her attachment to it: "When I got to New Mexico that was mine. Equally soon as I saw it that was my land. I'd never seen anything like information technology before, but information technology fitted to me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's unlike. The sky is different, the air current is different." The oft surprising reds and pinks of the land in these paintings are authentic renderings of the colorful desert scenery.

Oil on canvass - Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

1965

Sky above Clouds, Four

O'Keeffe'southward subject matter was always inspired by her life and the series Sky above Clouds is no exception, every bit the painting speaks to her many travels in the 1950s and 1960s. While en road to the Far East, she became intrigued by the view of the clouds below the airplane and sought to render this aerial view in paint as if to symbolize her own expanded view of the globe. Remarkably, as she was well-nigh lxxx years onetime at the time, she began stretching enormous canvases, nearly 24 feet wide, to capture the expansiveness of the scene. This painting, with its high horizon line and simplified clouds that extend beyond the frame, shows the influence of Eastern landscape painting, which also often employs a loftier horizon line with a broad view of the land. The work underscores that O'Keeffe's art, whatever the motif, remains consistent over many decades: she renders a naturalistic scene or object in such a way as to focus on its essential formal elements and return information technology abstractly.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

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