Georgia O'Keeffe

"To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage"

Georgia O'Keeffe

(1887-1986)

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15th 1887, the second of seven children. She grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she was given art lessons at home and her talents were quickly recognised. By the time she had graduated from school in 1905 she was determined to have a career as an artist.

Studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and then in New York she became interested in imitative realism. Shortly after this she gave up art saying she could never achieve what she wanted working in this medium. Her interest in art was rekindled four years later when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia. It was here Alon Bement from Columbia University introduced her to the then revolutionary ideas of his colleague at Teachers College, Arthur Wesley Dow.

"I decided to start anew, to strip away what I'd been taught"

Georgia O'Keeffe

Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that the subject matter was best realised through harmonious arrangements of line, colour and notan (the Japanese system of light and darks). Dow's ideas offered Georgia an alternative to imitative realism and she experimented with them for two years while working as Bement's assistant.

O'Keeffe then went to New York and began a series of abstract drawings in charcoal. She posted some of the drawings to a classmate who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impressario, Alfred Steiglitz on January 1st 1916. Steiglitz began corresponding with O'Keeffe and exhibited ten of her charcoal drawings at his avant garde art gallery 291. A year later he held an exhibition solely of her work and offered her a year's financial support to carry on painting which she accepted. By the time she moved back to New York she and Steiglitz had fallen in love, he left his wife and after the divorce was finalised, they married in 1924. They lived and worked together in Manhattan in the winter and spring at at the Steiglitz family estate at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, New York in the summer and autumn until 1929 when O'Keeffe began spending the summer painting in New Mexico, her favourite place in the world.

"The goal of art is the vital expression of self"

Alfred Steiglitz

(1864-1946)

Steiglitz took many portraits of Georgia, a lot of them nude. When he exhibited them at a gallery in 1921 they caused a public sensation. From 1923 Steiglitz worked tirelessly to promote O'Keeffe's work and organised many exhibitions. In the 1920's when she started painting New York skyscrapers and large scale depictions of flowers, which are among her best known paintings, she had become recognised as one of America's most important and successful artists.

This brought plenty of media attention which got worse in 1928 six of her calla lily paintings sold for $25,000 dollars, the largest sum ever to be paid to an American artist at the time.

"One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt"

Georgia O'Keeffe

In the summer of 1946 while spending the summer painting in New Mexico, Steiglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She quickly flew to New York to be with him. He died soon afterwards. Georgia took his ashes to Lake George and buried them under a tree. Steiglitz looked after all her business affairs and for the first time she had to manage them.

In 1949, three years after Steiglitz's death she moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose stunning landscapes had inspired her work since 1929. O'Keeffe captured the essence and beauty of the New Mexico desert, it's vast skies, rich colours and architectural forms, she said "all the earth's colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands."

She continued to live happily in the places she loved, her ranch the Ghost House and her house in Abiquiu where she painted until sadly her eyesight failed and she was forced into retirement.

A young potter Juan Hamilton arrived at the ranch one day looking for work. Georgia soon employed him full time. "He came just at the moment when I needed him". He became her closest confidant, companion and business manager. He helped her write a book about her art and she allowed a documentary crew to make a film. A kiln was installed and although she could paint no longer, she was very happy with Juan and continued to make objects in clay until two years before her death in 1986 aged 98.

"I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for"

Georgia O'Keeffe

This blog is wonderful because it's making me rediscover things I loved a long time ago and look at them again with fresh eyes. I've always loved Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. I adore the organic shapes in the paintings, her use of rivers, sky, flowers, shells and bones and the colours are always so beautiful and vibrant.

Here is some of her work to brighten up your day.

"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. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not"

"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale you could not ignore it's beauty"

Georgia O'Keeffe

"I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore"

Georgia O'Keeffe

"Sun bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now, after all man's destruction is finished"

Georgia O'Keeffe

"The days you work are the best days"

Georgia O'Keeffe

(1887-1986)

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