Georgia O'Keeffe
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Georgia O'Keeffe in 1918
Georgia O'Keeffe is probably best known for her paintings of flowers which she produced in the 20s and early 30s. Their style is characteristic of much of her work - huge canvases, smooth brushwork and blending of colour, and a focus often close-up to the point of abstraction. Her work spans the border between representational and abstract, and she frequently spoke of her aim not to paint a thing in itself, but to represent what she felt about the subject of her painting. As well as flowers, leaves and trees, she is also known for her paintings of the New Mexico desert landscape, and the bones she found there. While many of her works, both representational and abstract, drawn on natural forms, she also found inspiration in the sky-scrapers and bridges of urban America.
In both her painting and her life, O'Keeffe was independent. She was born in Wisconsin in on 15 November 1887, and started drawing at an early age. She was successful in art school, but dissatisfied with the emphasis on imitating the old masters, and for a time abandoned painting, briefly taking work as a commercial artist before turning to teaching. She worked as a 'painting supervisor' at a school in Texas, before moving to New York for teacher training. Her breakthrough came while she was teaching in South Carolina in 1915, when she decided to set aside her formal training in order to paint what she felt:
I can't live where I want to - I can't go where I want to - I can't do what I want to... I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to, and to say what I wanted when I painted...
Special no. 16, 1918
She was inspired by the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow and Wassily Kandinsky. Dow advocated simplified, clear forms as are found in Japanese art, and argued for art as expression over representation: the artist should draw on nature for inspiration, but not imitate it. Kandinsky, too, taught that colour and form should be dependent on the inward feelings of the artist, rather than on outward appearance in nature.
O'Keeffe began with a series of charcoal drawings, which she later named 'Specials' in order to mark their significance to her development as an artist. She said of these,
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.
Blue and Green Music, 1919
These drawings came to the attention of the photogropher Alfred Steiglitz, who exhibited them at his gallery in 1916, and gave her her first solo exhibition the following year. This relationship was to prove extremely significant. O'Keeffe left her current teaching job in Texas in 1918, to move close to Steiglitz in New York. He became her premiere supporter and advocate, arranging her exhibitions and selling her paintings, as well as producing an extensive series of photographic portraits. Soon after she arrived, he left his unhappy marriage and moved in with her. They were married in 1924.
Among O'Keeffe's pieces produced early in her time in New York are her series of abstract representations of music. She also began to work more on still lives, and completed the first of her magnified flower paintings in 1924. Her aim in these paintings was to make people stop and look afresh at her subject:
Oriental Poppies, 1928
Everyone has many associations with flowers... Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower... because it is so small: we haven't time, and to see takes time... 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.
Alongside her still lives, O'Keeffe produced her series of paintings of New York city. These paintings play with different perspectives and effects of light. Often she was inspired by photography, as for example in The Shelton with Sunspots, in which she catches the effect of a camera taking a photograph into the sun.
The Shelton with Sunspots, 1926
Radiator Building, Night, New York, 1927