I have always been awed by the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe.  The intimate

Oriental Poppies, 1927

details of her larger-than-life flowers, the clarity of color that seems to float on the surface void of any brushstrokes, and the simplification of shapes that strips away anything unessential all come together to create O'Keeffe's masterpieces of perfection.  When seeing her work, it is easy to understand why she is considered one of America's most innovative artists in a career that spanned much of the 20th century. (The painting above is part of the University of Minnesota art collection.  Read the article below about the local showing of this famous piece.)

Over the past years, I have been very fortunate to be able to spend several weeks in "O'Keeffe country."  Once again this summer I found myself in New Mexico immersed in the works and life of this great iconic artist, and once again I experienced the same emotional exhilaration when viewing her work.   The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe  was showing the traveling exhibit entitled "Abstractions," a compilation of over 125 of O'Keeffe oils, drawings, charcoals, watercolors, pastels, and even sculptures.  What made this show so unique was that it was devoted to her abstract works which have remained relatively overlooked in favor of her representational subjects, work that was so revolutionary for an artist of the first half of the 1900's, especially a female one.  As I viewed these pieces I became fascinated not only by the artworks, but also by the story behind their creation. 

Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "Since I cannot sing, I paint."  At an early age she longed for a way to express the intense feelings she had within her, feelings that would communicate the passion she felt for the beauty around her on the family's 600-acre dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.  Encouraged by her mother, Georgia began taking weekly private drawing lessons at age 11 and soon found her expressive voice in art.  "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for," she later declared.

It took several years, however, before Georgia was truly able to fully  express on paper what she so desired to communicate.   In 1905 at age 18, she began her formal art education by attending two years at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, followed by another two at the Art Students League in New York.  But rather than being inspired by her training, Georgia became disillusioned and decided to abandon her fine art studies altogether saying, "I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use?"  Once again she longed for a true form of expression to convey the deep thoughts and feelings welling within her. From 1908 until 1914 Georgia held a variety of positions: a commercial artist in Chicago; a high school art teacher in Chatham,

O'Keeffe as a teacher in 1915

Virginia; Art Superintendent in Amarillo, Texas; and finally, an art instructor at the University of Virginia, where, upon the urging of her sister, she once again began taking art classes.  This was, in O'Keeffe opinion, a major turning point in her life for it is where she came in contact with the art philosophy of Arthur A. Dow, a contemporary educator, author and artist.  His ideas appealed to her; as she put it, "This man had one dominating idea; to fill a space in a beautiful way - and that interested me."  From this point on, O'Keeffe's art career set out on an entirely new course. 

Unfortunately, only a few artworks remain of these very earliest days in Georgia's career.  So disillusioned with all the work done so far, she destroyed everything completed in her ten years of schooling, abandoned all the techniques from her past training and struck out on a path of her own.  In 1915, she began experimenting with various mediums in an effort to find her own unique visual voice.  With a great flurry, O'Keeffe focused on the use of charcoal, and from this material she learned about expressing herself abstractly using only gradations of black and white values. Her subject matter was always closed rooted in her environmental surroundings.  A group of these revolutionary pictures actually resulted in the first showing of her work in 1916, at Alfred Stieglitz's famed Gallery 219 in New York. 

Next Georgia's exploration continued with the use of watercolors.

Lake George, New York, 1918.

  In the photo to the right, she can be seen with her watercolors as she observes and reduces the forms in the plants nearby to create abstractions of bold and vibrant colors. She was fascinated by color - "It is one of the things that makes life worth living" -  and exploited the medium as she constantly created new colors.  Fascinated by its fluidity, she began to flood wet paper with pure pigment as she learned to convey her message about the environment in a dynamic and expressive way.  Her inability to control the medium once caused her to say, "After about ten attempts - I certainly have to laugh at myself - It's like feeling around in the dark - thought I knew what I was going to try to do but find I don't - guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it."  And later yet when writing to a friend she stated, "I've just come to the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of watercolor landscapes before I will look for a possible fair one."  And so she continued to paint one picture after another in watercolor, because in this medium she discovered the emotional power and beauty of clear, vibrant color that added impact to the

Blue 1, watercolor, 1916, sold at Christie's Auction for $3,008,000.

visual language she was striving to perfect.  At first she only used one color with its many tonal variations (to the left), but later she began using two or three additional colors. Think of how incomprehensible it would have been for her to think that a watercolor from this experimental time period would sell for millions of dollars, as Blue 1 did in 2007!!!.  Perhaps the incredible value of her unique work comes from Georgia's ability to strip down all the unnecessary external information in order to reach the true essence of an object or a scene.  In doing so she abandoned all conventions of art and painted simply to satisfy herself, making it possible for us to clearly see a piece of her inner self.  As a critic once said, "Each picture is in a way a portrait of herself."  I find that for me it is this complete honesty in self-expression that makes O'Keeffe's work so emotionally wrought.

The last medium that O'Keeffe experimented with during these early years was pastel.  If from charcoal she gained insight into the use of tonal gradations, and from watercolor she learned about expressive color and the use of bold yet subtle strokes, it was from pastels that she discovered the soft blending of color that enabled her to obtain clear, impeccable surfaces in her works.  In the years that followed, Georgia combined all of the knowledge gathered during these early exploratory years using charcoal, watercolor and pastels to create the oil masterpieces for which she is so famous.  By 1924, the early simplified and stylized representations that were abstractions of her inner self had evolved into the enlarged, intimate flower motifs and favorite New Mexico landscapes that filled her canvases for the next three decades, as seen in Oriental Poppies above.  Georgia continued painting until the 1970's when her eyesight failed and she was forced to quit.  Despite the fact that she had lost her central vision, she continued to express herself creatively through clay sculptures.  Although she did get satisfaction from this medium, it was not the same as her beloved painting.  As she once said, "The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that makes one 's life."   How fortunate we are to have our lives enriched by the legacy this great painter left us.  Read below to see where you can view one of O'Keeffe's great masterpieces.