“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.”
These are the words of American abstract artist Georgia O’ Keeffe. Born in Wisconsin on November 15, 1887, she was second in a family of seven children. Growing up on a farm, she loved the watercolour lessons she took from a local artist. By the time she was 12, Georgia knew she wanted to become an artist. At 18, she went to study at The Art Institute of Chicago and later moved to New York City.
When in New York, she visited Gallery 291, an art gallery owned by photographer Alfred Steiglitz. Here, she saw paintings of popular European artists such as Henri Matisse, for the first time. She moved away from New York and taught art for a while in South Carolina and Texas. She sent some of her charcoal drawings to a friend who lived in New York. The friend showed the drawings to Alfred Steiglitz, who realised her talent. Steiglitz wrote to Georgia and the two became friends. He was the first to display her work in his gallery. Some years later they got married and Georgia moved back to New York.
Towers and flowers
New York skyscrapers and flowers were the main subjects of Georgia’s paintings at this time and she became known as one of America’s most important artists. At the time, photographers were taking close-up pictures and Georgia began to paint close-ups of flowers — something which nobody had done before. She would look carefully at flowers to find beautiful shapes within them and paint these shapes on large canvases. Georgia was an abstract artist. Sometimes, the paintings did not look like flowers but were beautiful. She used bright, bold colours and simple lines.
In the summer of 1929, Georgia travelled to New Mexico. She loved the vast, open desert landscapes and historic adobe buildings. Adobe consists of bricks of clay and earth used by the Native Americans in the area. She began to visit every year to paint the mountains, desert and even the skulls of dead animals that she found in the desert. After her husband died, Georgia moved her home to New Mexico.
In 1950, she started to travel all over the world and created beautiful paintings of Mount Fuji in Japan, and the mountain peaks of Peru. She started a series of paintings with the clouds in the sky and the rivers below as her subjects.
As she grew older, Georgia’s eyesight began to fail. She continued to paint till her death even though she was nearly blind. She died at 98 in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1986. During her lifetime, she painted over 2,000 pictures of flowers, leaves, rocks, shells, bones and other forms of nature along with New York cityscapes and landscapes of New Mexico.
Her two homes and studios in northern New Mexico are maintained by The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.
You can view many of her works in their collection online at: www.contentdm.okeeffemuseum. org/cdm/landingpage/collection/gokfa
