Georgia Totto O'Keeffe is one of my favorite American artists. She was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. She was a teacher in Texas from 1913 to 1918. In 1916, she came to the attention of the American photographer and art gallery director Alfred Stieglitz (whom she married in 1924) when she sent a packet of drawings to a mutual friend, by way of keeping in touch. Stieglitz exhibited her work at 291, his gallery in New York City until he died in 1946. To learn more about her, follow this link. O'Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings, her abstracts and her paintings of the New Mexican desert. Here are some of my my favorite O'Keeffe flower paintings. To see some of my other favorites (non-flower paintings), follow this link.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way— things that I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe, in an exhibition announcement, January 1923
She was drawn to the austerity and mysticism of the country's symbols; life as a struggle, sadness, and resurrection.
Anita Pollitzer, from A Woman On Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe
They were most wonderful against the Blue -— the Blue that will always be there as it is now after all men's destruction is finished. I have tried to paint the Bones and the Blue.
Georgia O'Keeffe, in an exhibition catalog, 1944
She says very little, but she looks and once in a while something is said that sums everything up in a crystal, inevitable clarity. This quality you perhaps have seen a million times to my once or twice, but it explains a lot—everything in fact.
Ansel Adams to Alfred Stieglitz, Yosemite, California, September 10, 1938
When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.
Georgia O'Keeffe, in an exhibition catalog, 1944
I brought home the bleached bones as my symbol of the desert. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around— hair, eyes and all their tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable -— and knows no kindness with all its beauty.
Georgia O'Keeffe, "About Myself," catalog statement, 1939
Everyone has many associations with a flower. You put out your hand to touch it, or lean forward to smell it, or maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking, or give it to someone to please them. But one rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.
Georgia O'Keeffe, catalog statement, 1926
Those who wrote of "sex" in her flower paintings had undoubtedly not studied the flowers to know how true was her expression of them. Georgia did not care what was said. It was impossible for her not to want to paint corollas, calyxes, petals, stems—the essential parts of the flower with all their depth of color and in their wondrous forms. She was painting nature, as it seemed to her, exciting and wonderfully alive.
Anita Pollitzer, from A Woman On Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe
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